Shayla Waugh

This June, Professor Marie-Pierre Baggett took a group of SDSU student to the International Institute of Rambouillet in France. The students spent five weeks taking French courses and discovering the history of the area.SDSU junior Natasha Stoick was one of the students who took the trip. She said her love of Europe and European history were the deciding factors in going to the institute. Stoick said she was in awe of the history that surrounded her while she was in France.”Who knows, maybe a medieval joust once took place in a field I admired, or Napoleon rode a horse on the very street that I walked on,” said Stoick. “It was the discovery of learning how to truly appreciate something: a street, a building or even a piece of art. If you truly take in the magnificence of an object, no matter how minuscule or enormous, you can take away so much more from the experience.”The classes at the institute ran Mondays through Fridays, with three two-hour classes each day. Kyle Horton, a global studies and French major, also took the trip. Students were placed within five different levels of class, depending on their languag experience, Horton said. She was in a class of six students.”It was amazing just meeting all these people from all these different places. You are thrown into this place for like five weeks with people from everywhere: Korea, Japan … it was definitely a culturally-enriching experience,” she said.When the students weren’t studying, they were out visiting sites around the area. Among the places that the group visited were the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Muse d’Orsay, Versailles, Notre Dame and the Cathedral Chartres. A senior French major, Andrew Tischler, said his favorite part was visiting Versailles. “I really enjoyed Versailles. It was amazing to see the ch