From my last strength to my next strength
This piece was originally published in the Annie Wright Schools Strength Alumni Magazine. It can be found here.
Plenty of undergraduates spend a semester in France. I decided to go for two years, and an entire degree.
I didn’t decide on France to get out of the US, or to get away from my family, or even to be original. In fact, I never thought I would want to live in France. To be blunt, the reason I applied is because France happens to have a world class school of Political Science, that partakes in a program that would allow me to spend two years in one place and focusing on one major, and two in another focusing on another subject.
My experience so far has been a somewhat wild ride. While I have gotten the opportunity to meet students and intellectuals from every corner of the world, I also have had to deal with French bureaucracy in all its forms. There is a running joke amongst the international students of my campus (about 60% of the school) that a flood better come soon to get rid of the visa offices. Nothing is ever open, and if it is, it’s never open on time.
That being said, there have been unforeseen benefits to living here, that I would not be benefitting from had I not taken this leap. For one, the community is unmatched. I attend a satellite campus that focuses on the Middle East, North Africa, and Mediterranean region, and as a result, I am a part of a group of people the likes of which I have never experienced, including during my decade in Indonesia attending international schools and my time at Annie Wright.
The thing about the Middle East is that no matter what individuals think about it, they’re definitely thinking about it in some form, and their governments are, as well. As a result, much of my cohort are here on military or government scholarship, having been sent to learn about the region to become members of the intelligence or foreign relations communities. As someone who has similar goals, I often sit in class and imagine our future selves, having impromptu reunions at conferences for humanitarians, or G20 Summits.
For many people in my program, going abroad seemed like the most preferable, or even the only preferable option. My current university, and even more specifically my dual Bachelor’s degree program within Sciences Po, seems to attract a certain type of student. I can think of only one two peers who didn’t grow up straddled between more than one country, in some form. Having only one citizenship, as I do, is in some ways outside of the norm for us. I have classes where I am the only American. In my French courses, I get to hear French spoken in Kazakh, German, and Romanian accents, which allows me to catch nuances in the French pronunciation simply because all of our attempts sound so different.
I have found my way of life here to be inspiring, motivating, and adventure-filled. When making my college decision, I wanted to take a route which would challenge my way of life, my way of thinking, and my way of learning. My other options for universities in the United States seemed, to me, like the would-be crafters of versions of myself that I already knew. I could imagine who I would be after four years at each one, and while they were all people I could look up to, I didn’t want to lock myself into those molds. Whether you’re down the street from your mom or across the world, college is meant to be a formative and explorative time, and I feel there’s a responsibility to oneself make sure you experience some type of change. That was the “college experience” I was looking for, even if I went about it by untraditional means. Being in France giving me that experience, and so much more.
While the IB program didn’t make me internationally minded enough to move abroad, it did give me a lot of vocabulary and a framework through which I could articulate and look at my own perspective. I remember being at Annie Wright and figuring out what my identity meant to me amongst girls who had grown up in Tacoma and never left as well as girls who had just arrived for the first time. Courses like IB English Literature made me question who I am and why. Global Studies and Global Politics made me look at this question on a different level, in terms of nationalism and the governments under which I grew up.
What I loved about Annie Wright was that it provided me opportunities to become who I wanted to be. As a freshman, I saw the red ties above me growing into accomplished young women, and heard their May Day bios. Even then, I could tell you what I wanted mine to say about me. Not about where I was going to college, but what I had accomplished while at Annie Wright, who I was during my time there, and what my goals were for the future. I loved that Annie Wright allowed me to become that image of myself, but by the time I was writing my own bio, I knew I didn’t want to do the same process over again: I wanted to go in not knowing exactly who I would be when I came out.
While my program attracts a specific type of eighteen-year-old at the time of application, it doesn’t tell us who we need to be by the time we leave it. At entry, we were all the type of freshman that the Annie Wright community knew me as: the internationally minded, highly politically focused, impassioned orators and opinion holders. But by the time we have completed our two years at Columbia, we continue to be all those things, but we also get to be physicists, mathematicians, or musicians. For the first two years, I can focus on becoming the political scientist my fourteen-year-old self knew I wanted to be, and in the years after that, I can become whoever I want to be.
