George A. Craddock '84 applied to the Association Atlantique expecting to spend his summer in France at a teller's window. Instead, he found himself in the currency-trading department of the Kuwaiti-French Bank, getting "exposure to the Euromarket" and as many days off as he wanted.
"Because my job was in a new bank, they thought accepting me was a way of establishing relations with the U.S.," he explains. "They thought treating me nice was a way of treating the U.S. nice."
Gary B. Martin '84 found a job through OCS-OCL in a management training program at the National Westminster Bank in London, where he shuttled around between international and domestic divisions and met "everyone from 15- and 16-year-olds at the lower levels to upper management people" and got an insider's tour of London pubs.
"London is a city you can't see in a few days," he says. "There are nooks and crannies, parks and pubs, you don't see unless you're with locals."
Other students agree that working in Europe gave them a different picture of what it is like to live there. Griffin discovered that "Londoners could be very polite on the surface, but if you assumed they were being friendly that was making a mistake." He says if he went to Europe again he would probably choose Paris.
Hurwitz, who boarded with a Black family in Paris, found that racism is more prevalent in France than here. "The family was suspicious of me when I first arrived," he says. "They expected me to be a racist."
While most students say they picked up job skills, language skills and certainly experience working in Europe, none says that they picked up extra cash.
"It was a net loss," says Craddock. "The airfare was more than I made in the entire summer."
"The job I had would probably have paid twice as much here," says Dorfman. "But rents there aren't half as much, and food isn't half as much!"
Finding housing can be difficult, too; some students searched through newspaper ads for rented rooms, while others moved in with friends or boarded.