Global Impressions

“There is nothing so mouth-watering… As hot, freshly roasted chestnuts,” at least according to the juniors of the class of 1951 in Paris, as reported in The Springfield Sunday Republican on February 5, 1950. It seems odd for a newspaper to devote a whole page to pictures of college juniors doing perfectly commonplace things in a foreign city—buying books, looking at art, eating chestnuts—especially since by 1950 the Smith Paris program had been around for almost twenty-five years. Even Paris should have lost its novelty by then. And maybe it would have naturally, except that for the twenty-three juniors of the class of 1951 this Paris was all new; they were only the third group to return to Paris since the program had been canceled following the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

These women of the class of ’51 took a chance to live in a country still very much recovering from the trauma of war. Their host families had lived through the Occupation, and some of the young men in their classes at the Sorbonne had doubtless been soldiers, or maybe even in the Resistance, but the realities of post-war Paris didn’t scare them away.

Juniors kept coming, and they have been going in an unbroken stream every year since, straight to the ninetieth anniversary of the program, to be celebrated next year. Every Smith alum must know someone who spent her Junior Year Abroad in France—it’s entrenched that deeply in the college’s history. So although Gertrude Perkins, pictured in the photo buying her cone of chestnuts, didn’t leave any letters describing just how delicious savoring a roasted chestnut on a damp and cold winter day might be, there is no doubt that any student from the program, from any year, would be happy to tell you.

Growing up on Long Island, Bailey couldn’t wait to be able to travel and visit other places. The Global STRIDE project gave her the opportunity to spend a summer in Berlin, which was her first time being independent in a foreign country. That experience made her very interested in the idea of this journal. Next year she hopes to contribute more content as she joins the next year of Smithies in Paris.