Over the break, I started contacting students in the PhD French program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Two responded back to my ad stating that they would be interested in being interviewed.

This past week, I have just been developing ideas for my final project and how to present it at NCUR. So far, some ideas that I have are showing a preliminary version of my map and a video clip. My general outline for the presentation, as of now, will be:

1. Introduce the topic: why care about French people in NYC? What is the purpose of this project? Briefly compare to Americans with their abundance of memoirs in France. Is it a cultural thing? Mention the strong presence of Francophilia in NYC especially. This is another way to understand one of the biggest aspects of international culture in NYC.
2. Talk about place and identity.
3. Explain my research methodology: interviewing people (and any specific cut-offs)!
4. Show website/map.
   1. Play a brief video clip.
   2. Explain some aspects of the different interviews: recurring themes/locations and some funny stories.
5. Describe why NYC is a popular choice according to my interviewees and how the French culture in the city relates back to them. (Is it because of the French expatriates or the Francophiles or both?)
6. Discuss future of project.

Aside from the website/map and video part, I envision this mainly to be a PowerPoint although it does seem to be more like a lecture. I want to find more engaging and interactive ways to present my project. Maybe discussing it in class will give me some better ideas.

As for now, I need to start interviewing subjects. I will contact them this weekend to see if they are available next week or the week after. If worse comes to worse, I could do online interviews for now and then ask them to do a mock interview for video and photo purposes later. This way, I will have at least some data for the first mock presentation at the end of February.