Halsbury Work Experience in France

The first week of the summer holidays is over and what a week it has been. Usually, the end of the summer term means that hours and hours of relaxation are to follow but, for me, not this year. Less than 24 hours after finishing for the year, three friends and I jumped on a coach to Lille, France for a week of language-advancing work experience. Yes, the prospect of working completely alone in an environment where not one person speaks the same language as you was fairly daunting and, yes, I had questioned over and over again why I had put myself up to it. Nevertheless, we got on that coach with optimism and were eager to start our journey to perfecting our Français.

Despite the four-and-a-half hour delay that our trip was subjected to due to increasing pressure on channel services, a sing-a-long to Mamma Mia and Les Misèrables meant that we arrived at the hotel raring to get out into the evening air for some dinner. One hour we had to find a place to go and eat. One hour it took to finally decide that really our ‘best’ option was to have a portion of chips from McDonald’s. Oh yes. We truly did start our holiday abroad in style.

The next morning, it was time to get to know the forty other daring students who were to participate in work experience by splitting into groups and practising the route to our placements. Easy- you would have thought. Our seemingly simple trip on the metro was followed by an hour of wandering, completely lost, around the campus of l’Université de Lille 1. Just as we were beginning to give up, a man offered to show us the way- yippee. And he then invited us to a party. Extra bonus, I know.

My placement was the furthest away out of everyone’s. The rest of my group were based in Hotel de Ville, a shopping centre with every type of restaurant going, every lingerie shop desired and every clothing shop you’d ever want. Mine, on the other hand, was at a radio.

Campus Radio Lille has been running at the university since 1969 and is presented by a mixture of students, teachers and other locals from the area. Quite a few of the presenters I spoke to over the duration of my placement had started at the radio over fifteen years ago, as a student at the university themselves, and then had continued working on the radio ever since. As a walked up to the extraordinarily-bright exterior of the radio, a woman started speaking in French to meet- and I had absolutely no idea what on earth she was saying. On the information sheet I received from the radio, it said that the candidate would ‘ideally have a high level of French’. Erm, well, despite studying the subject for over six years, I am definitely not anywhere near the fluency of a French two-year-old.

The first fifteen minutes of the placement were perhaps the most terrifying and stressing fifteen minutes of my life, as I pictured myself panicking in French for the rest of the week. However, after those first fifteen minutes, when it was established that my French wasn’t exactly of the same ‘high level’ they had anticipated, I honestly had one of the best weeks of my life.

Over the week, I had the opportunity to record ‘jingles’ for the radio, which are basically the 20 second-long clips of speech that advertise or introduce the next programme. I was allowed to record them in French and, after a bit of translation, I would also record them in English (which, unsurprisingly, was a lot, lot easier to do). In addition, I sat in on live broadcastings across the week, listening in on science readings to classical musical. By the end of the week, I felt that I had a true understanding of how a local radio works and was genuinely sad to wave goodbye to the place I had called home for the week. The presenters could not have been more understanding and patient as I struggled my way through each and every sentence… Thank you to them all!

In France, the lunch breaks are considerably longer than they are in England, with the radio office being closed for ninety minutes between 12 and 13:30pm every day. As the university was very quiet with the majority of students being away on holiday, every lunch break I would hop on the metro (again) to meet up with a friend at the shopping centre she was working at. The food there was magnifique. On the first day, I had a gigantic profiterole for lunch, which was followed by a pot of watermelon to, you know, balance out my diet.  The café/shop was called Flunch and, despite not having heard of it before, there seemed to be quite a few of them. Next time you go to France, you know exactly where to go.

After each exhausting day, the fun would not simply stop there. Every single evening, we went out and visited restaurants, bars and, on one day, we even went to a laser quest centre. This laser quest centre was not just any laser quest place though. It was set out over two floors, with bridges, stairs and ramps to clamber desperately over as you belted it brutishly away from the opposition. Although the game is something one normally associates with seven-year-olds’ birthday parties, I don’t think I have ever seen a bunch of 16 to 18 years olds be so competitive. Despite only earning 300 points to the top players’ 7600, I was- and still am- pretty damn proud of those 30 laser-kills and, er, 54 laser-deaths.

Even though our group was very large, everybody became such good friends over the week and Facebook has never seemed so essential now that we've returned.  The goodbyes on our last day were certainly heartfelt, with many people evidently devastated that our incredible week was over. Thank you so much to our lovely leaders who helped organise all the activities and to the wonderful Nadia who helped my French improve so greatly over the week.

If you would like more information on doing work experience in France, I highly recommend visiting Halsbury Travel at www.workexperienceabroad.co.uk