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In an atmosphere of joy and friendliness, Hamilton in France students celebrated International Women’s Day on Thursday, March 8th during a lunch at Reid Hall, where the program’s office is located in Paris.

In January, the Hamilton in France program welcomed 10 students accepted to spend their spring semester in Paris. Director In-Residence Roberta Krueger and Assistant Director Laurence Lemaire led an orientation program to help the students in their transition to France.

Hamilton in France students visited the exhibition “Being Modern: Museum of Modern Art in Paris,” the first exhibition in Paris of the New York-based Museum of Modern Art’s collection, at the Louis Vuitton Fondation on Friday, Dec. 1.

On the morning of Nov. 18, Hamilton in France students embarked on a train leaving Paris for Alsace, Strasbourg, located in the eastern part of the country.

Changjun (Justin) Zhu ’19 has been awarded a tuition scholarship to study abroad in Rome, Italy, next semester. Zhu was selected from among a number of highly qualified candidates in a very competitive scholarship process to receive an API JCU (John Cabot University) Diversity scholarship for the full JCU tuition.

I studied abroad in Jordan in the fall of 2015, I studied in Spain the spring of 2016, and I returned to intern with ARDD-Legal Aid in Jordan the summer of 2016. Now that I look back on my time abroad I realize that I have grown a lot, and that my interests around immigration before going abroad did not change so much as they evolved.

During my junior year of high school, I was offered the rare opportunity to study Japanese for a year with a local Boys & Girls Club and travel to Japan for two weeks. After admiring Japan’s historical and religious sites, embracing the kindness of its people, and falling in love with the vibes of the country, I decided to pursue the language in college. Four semesters of Japanese later, as a Hamilton student I was accepted to the Middlebury Language Program at International Christian University to study in Tokyo for my junior fall.

Sitting in Stuttgart Airport on August 1, 2016, awaiting a flight back to Boston, I reflected upon my time in Germany and I wrote the following: “Whether people are from Germany, Italy, America, or Iraq, we’re all about the same. Yes, we have different experiences, and we have different traditions, but we are people. People first. And that will always unite us more than any difference of culture or religion could divide us. I loved learning that this semester because it gave me hope for the world –– hope that we can recognize these similarities and stop with the foolish xenophobia and useless hatred.”

During my semester abroad in Paris, I interned at TRINOV, a French waste management company that helped its clients become more sustainable and more cost-effective in their waste disposal practices. The company did this through software that organized the types of waste clients produced, determined what amount of the waste was recycled, and found better ways to dispose of each type of waste.