I’ve moved countries three times, and each move changed which language I lived in. I was born in the Republic of Benin, a small country in West Africa, and schooled in French there through ninth grade. In tenth grade, I switched to a Nigerian school, where the curriculum was in English. In 2018, I left for Montreal, worked for two years, mostly in French, and started ESL school there. That’s where my English comes from. Then Pittsburgh in 2024, and Computer Engineering at Pitt.

The first reason I applied to FAME was practical. The credits transferred cleanly. ENSEA had equivalents for the sophomore-year ECE courses I still needed, so a semester in France wouldn’t cost me a semester of progress. I cleared everything except one class I picked up over the summer. For an engineering major, math matters, and I’d tell any Pitt ECE student to check it first.

But that isn’t why I was excited.

I had never been to France. I grew up on French cartoons, French films, and French music, speaking the language every day of my childhood, and I’d never once set foot in the country. There’s something strange about knowing a place almost entirely through a screen. I wanted the food, the streets, and the people in person. I also have cousins there I’d talked to for years and never met. Getting to Bordeaux to see them was part of the plan from the start.

Professionally, I wanted to see engineering practiced somewhere other than the US. Every country builds its own habits about how a problem gets framed and where the real work in a project lives. I’ve only ever seen the American version. France was the right first stop, partly because I already had the language, and partly because Westinghouse, where I’d be interning that summer, has operations there.

So I arrived wanting three things: my first language back in my mouth every day, a look at an engineering education built on different assumptions than mine, and the start of a career that isn’t limited to one country.

I got all three. Not one of them in the way I expected.