A Brutally Honest Review of Our Year with TAPIF

If you’re a long-time follower of our blog, you’ve already read our many articles about the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF). We’ve detailed the application process, talked about our placement and visa difficulties, written about how we packed for our stay, given monthly updates, explained our orientation sessions, told our apartment hunt story, outlined our budget, shown our typical work schedule, shared free lesson plans, described our experience as a couple, and even given advice about putting TAPIF on your resume.

This time, we wanted to write an article for those who want to read a condensed, all-in-one review of our TAPIF experience. We’ve broken up the program into eleven categories and will use the following rating system:

★★★★★: Great experience
★★★★☆: Good experience
★★★☆☆: Mediocre experience
★★☆☆☆: Subpar experience
★☆☆☆☆: Poor experience

---

Visa Process

Moving to France is notoriously difficult, and even when assistants carefully assemble their paperwork, the TAPIF visa process often causes stress. From struggling to work with VFS Global, to having a placement change mid-summer, to never receiving my updated arrêté de nomination, our TAPIF visa process was indeed anxiety-inducing. While we received our visas and arrived in France on time, the whole affair went poorly.

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

---

Orientation

Every region in France holds at least one orientation session for the language assistants teaching in a particular academic year. The Académie de Reims hosted two orientation sessions for assistants in the region, both of which we wrote about in detail. The first successfully introduced us to our new jobs and to life in France in general, while the second was a discussion-and-workshop combo that left a lot to be desired. Overall, our orientation experiences were decent.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

---

Housing

TAPIF assistants are solely responsible for securing housing upon arrival in France. As we mentioned in our article about finding housing and our apartment tour video, we were lucky to have such an easy time. My professeur référent (a teacher from one of my assigned schools that was meant to be my point of contact throughout the program) happened to know a trusted landlord looking to rent out an apartment. We applied for VISALE, a free guarantor service, before arriving in France, toured the apartment on the last day of orientation, and moved in the same evening! We loved our apartment and the process couldn’t have been easier for us.

Rating: ★★★★★

---

CAF

Jalen and I applied for government housing assistance called l’aide personnalisée au logement (APL) provided by the Caisse d’Allocations Familiales (CAF) in December and received our first payment in January. We were entitled to 327 € total per month via direct deposit, which offset our rent expenses quite a bit. Though it wasn’t a quick process and it required a good amount of paperwork, the whole ordeal was relatively painless and definitely worth the effort.

Rating: ★★★★★

---

Banking

To receive the TAPIF salary, assistants must first set up a bank account in which to be paid. While Jalen had no trouble setting up his bank account with the help of his professeur référent, I did not have the same experience. Though I did have support from my professeur référent, I was turned down at two separate banks because I didn’t have my first bulletin de salaire (pay slip). However, I couldn’t have had a pay slip because without a bank account, I couldn’t be paid! Luckily, the third bank accepted me as a client and I received my first paycheck on time. Once our accounts were open, we had nothing but positive experiences with our banks.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

---

OFII Appointment

All TAPIF participants must complete a mandated medical check-up and chest x-ray as mandated by the Office Français de l’immigration et de l’intégration (OFII). Both of our appointments took place in November in the capital of our region, Reims. Since there isn’t a direct train from Troyes, where we lived, to Reims, we had to use BlaBlaCar, a carpool app, on our own dime to get to and from our appointments. Because the appointments weren’t consecutive, we each had to spend a whole day in Reims. The days were long, as we left early in the morning and didn’t arrive home until late in the evening, but the appointments themselves went off without a hitch.

Rating: ★★★★☆

---

Carte Vitale

Cartes Vitale are French health insurance cards that allow cardholders to easily identify themselves and pay for healthcare. TAPIF assistants are entitled to French healthcare and can get the care they need before the receipt of the card itself, but it requires extra reimbursement paperwork on the back end. Assistants’ schools are meant to submit the paperwork required for receiving a carte Vitale, but it sometimes falls to the assistant to do so. Jalen was unable to get help from his school in submitting his documents, for instance. In my case, my high school’s secretary took care of the process with me at the beginning of the school year. Though we submitted our paperwork differently, we both received our cartes Vitale in January. Jalen and I were fortunate to never require a trip to the doctor during the program, but wish that the process of getting his card had gone according to plan.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

---

Teaching

Teaching was an eye-opening experience for Jalen and I. It’s definitely not easy! We didn’t go into the program passionate about teaching, and we certainly didn’t leave the program with a teaching career in mind. However, we are thankful for the opportunity that teaching English gave us to live in France for an academic year and had plenty of great experiences with our students. Overall, the classroom portion of our time with TAPIF was okay.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

---

Salary

TAPIF’s salary is a hotly-debated topic among assistants – some are adamant that the pay is inadequate, while others have no issue living on 790 € per month. TAPIF does state that the stipend is not enough for an assistant to live like a typical French student in the Parisian region. Elsewhere, however, the stipend allows assistants to live a normal student lifestyle. We found this assessment to be true. Jalen and I had plenty of money for rent, groceries, transportation, and even funded our vacations with our salary. Overall, while we didn’t live lavishly, we had no issue with our pay.

Rating: ★★★★☆

---

Vacations

Without a doubt, the best part of our TAPIF experience was the 8 weeks of paid vacation time. We explored our home base, Troyes, and also visited Clermont-Ferrand, Caen, Paris, and Marseille on our vacations. We love that TAPIF gives assistants time to explore France and Europe in general, and the ample paid time off was well worth the other struggles we endured.

Rating: ★★★★★

---

Overall Experience

Though it wasn’t without bumps in the road, we loved our TAPIF experience. We learned a lot about France and even more about ourselves during our year as assistants. If given the choice to go back to our senior year of college knowing what we know now, we would absolutely make the choice to do TAPIF all over again.

Rating: ★★★★☆

---

Don’t hesitate to leave us a comment if you have any questions! If you’d like to know more about our TAPIF experience, check out our other articles and our YouTube channel.

Check out our video to prepare to participate in TAPIF!

• YouTube
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• WordPress
• TikTok