Beyond the classroom
Student Life
Where you live
Where you stay shapes how fast you learn and how at home you feel. We arrange everything before you land and confirm your placement before you book flights.
Host family
$155 / week · 1,450 MADYour own room in a Moroccan household, with breakfast and dinner included, and with them, the most valuable classroom we offer: a table where the conversation doesn't slow down for you until, one week, it doesn't need to. The fastest way to feel at home, and the option we recommend to anyone who asks.
Student accommodation
$175 / week · 1,600 MADYour own room with other students: a furnished flat, or a room in a riad in the medina, depending on what's free when you come. Water, electricity and wifi included. Independence, with company for the evenings.
Studio
$315 / week · 2,900 MADSelf-contained and entirely yours, for students who want to live alone, bills included. Studios are genuinely scarce in Rabat, so tell us early if this is the one that matters to you.
For practical information on what to pack, SIM cards, money, and your first Monday, see Before You Arrive.
The cultural program
Every week has a program of activities, announced Monday and posted on the board, and at least one is free, every week.
Cooking: a Moroccan meal from scratch, then the best part, sitting down to eat it together. Calligraphy: the reed pen, the ink, and Arabic as an art form. Zellige: the geometric tilework Morocco is famous for, taught by people who do it for a living. Pottery, discussion groups, museum afternoons, walks through the medina and the kasbah.
Workshops at the institute are included for everyone. Excursions with transport or entry fees are priced separately, and if you're on a Semester or Academic Year package, the weekly program is already inside your price.
None of this is decoration around a language course. Two hours of cooking in Arabic, with a teacher and three classmates and your hands full of dough, is two hours of Arabic: the kind that stays.
Your language partner
Twice a week, you sit down with a Moroccan university student and talk: in Arabic, about real things, and they don't switch to English the moment it gets hard.
It isn't a lesson and it isn't small talk. It's the bridge between the two: real conversation with someone your own age who lives the culture you're studying, and who takes you places a textbook doesn't go. Many students tell us afterwards that this was the hour their Arabic became theirs, and more than a few leave Morocco with a friend.
Language partner sessions are included in our programs.
Internships and volunteering
For students who want their time in Morocco to leave a mark beyond their notebooks.
We place you with an association or organization matched to your interests, background and level, subject to availability and the host's acceptance, and we arrange the placement agreement where one is required. Fields vary with our partners' needs: education, community work, social projects, and more by season.
Complete your placement and you leave with a certificate and a personal reference from us: the kind that names what you actually did.
For Academic Year students, the winter intersession is purpose-built for this: four weeks between semesters for an internship, a field study project or a volunteer placement.
Trips and excursions
Weekly, in and around Rabat: the Kasbah of the Udayas, Chellah, the Hassan Tower, the museums, the medina, visited with people who can tell you what you're looking at, in the language you're learning.
Weekends, across the country: Chefchaouen and Tangier, Fès and Meknès, Marrakech, the Sahara. Optional, priced individually on Dates & Fees, and worth it for a reason that goes beyond the photographs: every region of Morocco speaks its own shade of Darija. A weekend in the north retunes your ear. Students come back on Monday with stories, and with vocabulary nobody taught them.
Before you arrive
Everything before your first Monday
Papers
Passport. Valid for at least six months beyond your stay: the standard rule, worth checking today rather than at the airport.
Visa. Citizens of many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Canada, enter Morocco without a visa for stays of up to 90 days. Check the current rules for your nationality with a Moroccan consulate before booking, and if you need an enrollment letter for a visa application or for the border, we issue one: just ask.
Staying longer than 90 days? Academic Year students, this means you. There are established ways to handle it, and we walk every long-stay student through the options personally after enrollment. This is one of those things better done with us than read about online.
Getting here
Fly into Rabat–Salé (RBA), small, calm, twenty minutes from the institute, or Casablanca Mohammed V (CMN), the big international hub about an hour and a half away. Most long-haul routes land in Casablanca.
Book our airport transfer and a driver is waiting with your name when you land, from either airport, priced on Dates & Fees. Prefer the train from Casablanca airport? Entirely doable, and we'll send you the how-to.
Arrive the weekend before your Monday start. It gives you a day to land properly: unpack, walk the neighborhood, sleep, before your placement interview and first class.
Your accommodation is confirmed before you fly, with the address and your host's or building's details in hand. Nobody lands here wondering where they're sleeping tonight.
Money
Dirhams are easy to get once you're here. ATMs are everywhere in Rabat and work with international cards; withdraw what you need as you go. Exchange offices in the city center and at both airports will change cash if you prefer.
Cards are accepted in supermarkets, restaurants and larger shops. The medina, taxis and small cafés run on cash: keep some small notes on you.
Package and program prices are on Dates & Fees; each course page lists its own rates, with the extras priced right there.
Phone
Buy a local SIM in your first days: they're cheap, prepaid, and sold at the airport and in every neighborhood; bring your passport to register it. The three networks (Maroc Telecom, Orange, inwi) all cover Rabat well, and a month of generous data costs less than a single day of roaming abroad.
Once you have a number, give it to us: it's how we reach you quickly if anything changes.
What to pack
Plugs: Morocco runs on 220V with European two-pin sockets (types C and E). One universal adapter covers you.
Clothes: lighter than you think for most of the year, plus one properly warm layer. Rabat winters are mild outdoors and surprisingly cool indoors, because buildings here aren't built for heating. Everyday dress in Rabat is relaxed and varied; comfortable, reasonably modest street clothes and you'll never think about it again.
Otherwise: any prescription medication in its packaging, and honestly little else. Rabat is a capital city. Pharmacies are excellent and everywhere, and anything you forget can be bought within a tram ride.
Your textbook is waiting for you here: no need to hunt for it at home.
Your first Monday
Come in for the morning we tell you in your arrival email. Here's what it looks like:
If you haven't done your spoken placement online, you do it now: a short conversation, nothing to prepare. You meet the team, you see the building, you get your schedule and your book, and then you do the thing you came for: you go to class.
By lunchtime you'll have spoken more Arabic than most people manage in a month at home. That's the plan working.
And after that: stuck, lost, unwell, homesick, or just hunting the good fish restaurant, you have our numbers, and not only between nine and five. That's what we're for.
Contact Us
Whether it is about our courses and programs, accommodation, enrollment, or something else entirely, send us a message and we get back to you.
Address
Appt N°5, Imm N°106, Avenue Allal Ben Abdellah, Rabat, Morocco
Phone
+212 649 65 54 10
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