International Internships in Paris

I would not do an internship in Paris with this company. The coordinator was extremely rude and unprofessional. She did not set me up in the correct field and I spent several weeks in lingo despite my efforts to make things work. She was very disorganized, condescending and blamed me for any mishaps that occurred which was actually due to her negligence. I took it upon myself to find an internship by talking to people I encountered and doing my best to make connections. Again, this was without the help of International Internships LLC. My suggestion is to stay far far away from the Paris internship program. The internships I was given accused this company of fraud and told me to return home immediately and get my money back and I completely understand why after my experience.

Okay, so in a nutshell I had an absolutely awesome experience, probably the best of my life, HOWEVER, this was unfortuantely not due to International Internships support/coordinators. Yes it is true that I was placed in my field of interest, but to be completely honest, my experience in France was awesome because I made it awesome. Int'l Interships was very disorganized, the coordinator in Paris was very disorganized and very rude. She was extremely condescending and very unprofessional. So basically, I gave up working or even wanting to talk with International Internship people from early on and just took things by the reigns myself, because I'm a go-getter and take initiative by nature, so it wasn't too hard for me to do that. There were issues at first with my housing, but again Int'l Internships didn't do much about it besides the coordinator acting like it was my fault or something (like I said already, she was very unhepful and rude). My own university actually contacted me about it & cared, and would have fixed the issue if the problem hadn't resolved itself. As another example, I was told that I would possibly be able to switch departments, and again, no thanks to int'l internships, I just took initiative and had an interview with the "chef" himself and organized that. If I had wanted to, I could have even transferred to another location, but again, no thanks to the unhelpful coordinator, I made the connections and calls myself, and had the "o.k." from the other institution except I didn't have time in the end so just stayed where I was. Anyways, I think it's probably hit-and-miss with this company as far as placement, and as far as interracting with them, definitely not the most pleasant experience for me. If you are a go-getter and don't let anyone or anything get in your way of doing what you want to do & fulfilling your dreams like me, then you could make lemonade out of anything & have an awesome time. So in my honest opinion, Int'l Internships did place me right (hospital internship btw), and that's HUGE, kudos to them for that since I know others have not been placed well by them, so that was lucky that it worked out for me, but the disorganization and lack of professional and courteous support while there lead me to avoid talking to them and just doing my own thing, which worked out wonderfully!

While Paris is a beautiful city that I fully benefited from during the duration of my program, the internship itself was a joke. Not only was I guaranteed to have an internship in my field of interest, but when I said I was not happy with my placement, which had nothing to do with my field, I was told that would delay my start date for them to search again. Since my tickets were already purchased, I just tried to stay optimistic. I loved my co-workers and they struggled to give me tasks that would sort of benefit me, but I ended up doing half data entry and half translating, neither of which had to do with marketing. The other girls on my program had even worse experiences, one did not have a placement for the first two weeks of her program and then ended up assisting the internship coordinator! It did not help that when I later expressed my concern for the capabilities of the internship coordinator to the person in charge, that he yelled at me as if it were my fault. Definitely would not recommend this program to anyone I liked.