This semester, ENS de Lyon is welcoming 17 international exchange students from eight different countries, reaffirming its strong commitment to international openness. Among them, 11 students come from Italy, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, while the others represent regions such as China, India, Germany, Belgium, and Spain. Their presence enriches campus life by bringing together varied academic backgrounds, perspectives, and cultural experiences.

To ensure a smooth start to their stay at ENS de Lyon, the International Relations Office has set up an onboarding program combining practical information meetings with essential welcome resources. Several university services were involved in this collective effort, including housing and accounting services, as well as the Office for Equality and Non-discrimination, which offered a workshop to raise awareness and promote inclusion. In addition, the Association of International Students (ASSET) has also actively engaged in welcoming the newcomers, notably through social media contact groups and initiatives such as the “Café Polyglotte,” which encourages informal exchanges and meetings between students.

As Vice-President for International Relations Vincent Michelot emphasized during his welcome address, one of ENS de Lyon’s greatest strengths lies in its human scale.

One of the main assets of ENS de Lyon is its size: we are large enough to accommodate a superb variety of disciplines and fields but small enough to make it possible, over just one semester, for you to engage with scholars and students in fields that can be both very familiar or totally alien to you.

This openness is further reflected in the school’s strong encouragement of interdisciplinary approaches.

You are coming to a school which strongly encourages cross-disciplinary investigation, not only within social sciences and humanities, but also between STEM and social sciences, an approach which is fundamental to what the French call ‘sciences de la société’ and operates on the transition from research to policy-making.

Finally, he drew attention to the broader context in which the students begin their stay.

You are here in Lyon at a verry special time in French politics, that is during the campaign for the municipal elections (March 15 and 22). It's a cliché to say that mayors are the politicians the French feel the the closest to (which does not necessarily translate into voter turn-out numbers) but it does translate in concrete terms the idea that a municipal election more than any other election is the moment when the French define what they call ‘le vivre ensemble’.

ENS de Lyon warmly welcomes its international exchange students and wishes them a successful semester. Let your stay be an enriching journey both inside and outside the classroom!