What I Wish I Knew Before Moving to France as a Student (7 Years In)

I moved to France seven years ago as a student, and I feel like I have been through most of what this country can throw at a foreigner. If you are thinking about moving here to study, I am not going to talk you out of it. I love this place and I think you should come. But there are a handful of things I wish someone had told me on day one, because each of them would have saved me months. Here they are.

Learn French before you even arrive

If you are coming from a multicultural country like India, where everyone has a regional language but also speaks English at work, it is tempting to assume France works the same way. It does not. Here the regional language is the main language. You do not speak one language at home and English at the office. You speak French more or less everywhere.

Your classes will be in English if that is what you signed up for. But your networking, your job search, and your admin will all be in French. There are English-speaking jobs here, and I have written before about the pros and cons of studying a master’s in France, but your opportunities, personal and professional, are quietly capped by how much French you speak.

I started nine months before I arrived and reached A1, which was still not enough. It took about two years of classes and a lot of practice to reach B1, and only in the last year or two have I been able to talk about almost any topic without much difficulty. The strange part is that the better my French gets, the higher the ceiling moves. There is always another level. Start now. If you want the long version, here is how I learnt French.

Start networking from day one

As a foreigner in France you are rebuilding your life, and your network, from scratch. That matters more than it sounds, because a large part of the job market here is unlocked through who you know. Build your network deliberately from the very first week — and not only with people at companies. Network with your own classmates too. In one, two, or three years’ time, that cohort is your network.

Even if your first job does not come through someone you know, your second or third one very likely will. I have written more about this in networking for opportunities and the funnel theory of networking.

Your first job will be brutal — and that is the point

Getting your first job, or even your first internship, is hard. The honest framing is that it is a game of persistence. Everyone I know who genuinely wanted a job in France eventually got one. The only real variable was whether they gave up, and there will be plenty pushing you to. Treat rejections as a filter that moves you away from the things that were never the right fit, and keep your motivation high, because you will need the reserves.

Here is the encouraging half: the first job is hard, the second and third are far easier. A lot of it is trust. Until a French or Western company has seen one on your CV, they tend to trust you a little less. All it takes is one person at one company to take the chance. After that, doors open more easily. So be ready to struggle, and do not let rejection define your first year. If anything teaches you to handle it, it is moving to a country where you do not yet speak the language. I wrote about that whole adjustment in moving abroad is hard, and about the search itself in how I found my gap year internships.

Learn your rights as a foreigner

A lot of internationals here, especially after their first job, simply do not know what they are entitled to. They assume that because they are not French, they have no access to healthcare, unemployment cover, or the social benefits French residents rely on. That is not true, and the assumption costs people real money and security. I will not list every right in one blog post, but understand that you have far more than you think, and go and read about them properly.

The same goes for your visa. Learn exactly what it does and does not allow. As one example, on a student visa I could not legally freelance. On a salaried work visa you often can freelance alongside your job, as long as your employer agrees. Some work permits let you change jobs easily; others do not. None of this is volunteered to you — the authorities are not in the business of explaining your own rights to you, so the responsibility to find out is entirely yours.

Sort your carte vitale and médecin traitant early

The carte vitale is the most important thing to have if you fall sick here. Healthcare is roughly seventy percent covered by the social security system, but only once you are registered with it, and the carte vitale is your proof of that registration. There are plenty of guides on how to sign up, so I will not repeat them — just do it the moment you arrive.

Related to that, to be reimbursed at the full rate you also have to declare a médecin traitant, a primary doctor. I did not learn this until my school told me. It sounds bureaucratic, and asking a doctor to be your declared physician felt oddly like asking someone on a date, but it could not be simpler in practice. Once you have your carte vitale, book a normal GP appointment, go, and ask them straight up to be your médecin traitant. That is the entire process. You can change them later.

File your tax return from year one

File an income tax return from your very first year here, even when you have barely earned anything. If you ever want to apply for French nationality, you will usually need several years of filed returns to prove continuous residence, and without them you cannot apply at all — no matter how long you have actually lived here. Check the requirement for your own situation, but the principle holds.

The other reason is simpler: the first filing is an annoying, manual process. If you do it while you are already buried in first-year admin, every year afterwards becomes almost automatic. Get the pain over with early.

Build a support network, not just a professional one

The rest of this is less technical. Find other people like you — people you actually enjoy spending time with — and build a support network, because you are now alone in a new city in a foreign country. When things go wrong, and they will, it is the friends physically near you who get you through it.

My one piece of advice on adult friendships is that frequency beats everything. Hang out with the same people again and again rather than meeting someone new each week. Repetition is what turns acquaintances into the people you can call at 11pm. I dug into the emotional side of this in feeling at home abroad.

Make the effort with French people

Then, on top of your own crowd, go and spend time with French people. It can be genuinely hard to make French friends as an adult, but try anyway. The bonus is obvious: your French improves just by being around it. I have watched too many people move here and make zero effort to talk to locals because they are nervous, and they stay stuck. Do not be that person. Put yourself out there.

Don’t stress

My last point is the one I most wish I had heard. Do not stress too much. My first three months in France were so tense that when my parents visited, the first thing they noticed was how stressed I looked. Looking back, I had no real reason to be. I spent my entire first year so anxious about where my life was heading that I forgot to actually live it, and I could have got far more out of that time if I had relaxed even slightly.

So learn the French, build the network, sort the admin, and then let yourself enjoy the fact that you moved across the world to start something new. That part goes faster than you think.