Moving to France for Masters: A Guide for Filipinos

Alaykka Fowler
6 min readAug 11, 2024

The first part of my journey to become an international student in a foreign country was not very easy. I needed to figure out where to start. In fact, I was so lost that my planning and scheduling were all over the place! There was one thing I knew — I was going to France to fulfill my dreams of pursuing a better career for my future and my family.

August 2018: I moved to an unfamiliar city and had close to zero language skills

When I was preparing to go to graduate school in France, I found that helpful guides for Filipinos were quite hard to find. I guess this was most likely because this was an atypical destination for studying abroad among people from my country. If you are currently where I was about 6 years ago, confused and figuring things out, this piece is for you. I’m sure you have a lot of questions in mind, so read on!

Choosing and applying to the school

The easiest part (sort of) about starting my grad school journey was choosing which school to go to. In my case, I had the following criteria that the school had to have:

  1. A Master’s program that would lead me to career options that I would be interested in and would make me earn well
  2. Not exorbitantly expensive
  3. Situated in a French city that’s not Paris (nor any popular destinations)

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Alaykka Fowler

Born in the Philippines. Living in France. Writing for the heck of it.