Mon Été Parisien | My Parisian Summer

Coucou mes amis ! It’s Mary Kate here and I am currently completing my summer internship in Paris, France. My experience so far this summer has been very different than my semester abroad here in the fall, but in the best way possible! I live and work at the Fondation des Etats-Unis which is a part of the Cité Universitaire in the 14th arrondissement. The Cité Universitaire is a very unique part of Paris.

The Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (CIUP) is a place you can live if you are a student, for example pursuing your masters, in Paris. The Cité has 40 residence houses each representing a different country and the Fondation des Etats-Unis (the American house) is one of them. According to their website, the Cité Universitaire welcomes 12,000 students and researchers of 140 different nationalities. I love that I don’t just have the Parisian experience this summer, but a truly international one. The CIUP was created after WWI to promote peace and better understanding between countries. It’s kind of a utopia of sorts, with many countries living in harmony in the campus of the Cité Universitaire. One highlight about living here is that most everyone is in their 20’s and there is always something to do and people to meet.

My internship is with the culture office of the Fondation des Etats Unis. The FEU has 267 individual rooms including a floor for musicians and artists, many of which have concerts and shows that we organize. The people I work directly with (which is pretty much just my boss and one other intern) we coordinate and facilitate cultural events that the FEU hosts. My favorite event so far was a vernissage (art opening) of an exhibition called “Squaring the Circle: Harriet Hale Woolley, Past & Present”. The exhibition consists of artists all of whom have held the Harriet Hale Woolley scholarship at the FEU. The members of the show have all been artists in residence here, coming from many different generations. There are artists who stayed at the FEU in the spring of ’68 who told me many interesting stories about the student riots in Paris at the time. There is also a artist in the show who is a current scholarship holder and she’s only two years older than me. There are 14 artists who are a part of this exhibition, and I was lucky enough to meet the ones who came to Paris for the opening. For this exhibition I helped hang art, consulted with the curator, and got the artists pretty much anything they needed. It was so cool to see an art exhibition come alive from start to end and I also loved talking to the alumni to see what they are up to now. It was especially interesting for me as a History major because of the common history that is tied into their art.

Paris during the summer is such a magical place (it gets dark at 10 pm!) and I am so lucky that I get to spend 10 weeks here! I’ll leave you with some pictures that I’ve taken.

Bisous ! -MK