Blame it on the French

I am an engineer, but I never dreamt about becoming one when I was a child. I did not have anyone make me fall in love with the profession either. What made me go to university and hate my guts for five years was a phone call, an ex-boyfriend, and a quick and impulsive decision, and all of that was caused by a trip to France. 

I had French lessons in high school. I did not want to, but my mother thought it would improve my curriculum and help me one day expand my horizons. My negotiation skills were not so sharp then, and I caved. For years, I had extra lessons at school because - according to my mother- an additional language would eventually open doors in the outside world. To my surprise (and because "mothers are always right"), the opportunity appeared in my senior year. In the first semester, our teacher passed some leaflets about grants for studying abroad. If selected, we would have the chance to travel to France in the summer, spend a month with a local family, go to classes, and have fun activities and trips. None of us wanted summer lessons, but the rest of the plan seemed promising, so we filled in the forms and continued our busy lives as students for months before we had further information.

In my senior year, I decided to become a translator for the United Nations to help solve worldwide problems. The fallback plan was to study Image and Sound (TelCo or Telecommunications) because I liked movies, which seemed cool. Please don't judge me; I was seventeen then and had never left town before. I did not know much about anything. All I saw were monotonous lives: people disappearing from eight to five, smiling at others while shopping in the supermarket, taking their kids to the park, and meeting lifelong friends. I did not know what I wanted, but I was sure that was not it, so I saw my school grades as my ticket to leave and search for something better. I studied English and French and fought math and physics that year. I did all I could to keep the doors open to my choices, and then, around May, I got a letter telling me I would be in France for the whole month of July. 

The month before packing and leaving for my French adventure, I had my finals and joined all my classmates in "The Three Days of Hell." That's what we called the exams to access University: seven tests in three days to secure the scores to apply to schools nationwide. My scores were good, and a week before starting my adventure, I began to fill in and send out my applications. The first was for TelCo engineering, with no incidents. The second was Translation. While reading the forms, I saw the date for an extra exam: July 15th. 

"I cannot take an exam in July; I will be in France!" I said to my mother, angry (at myself) because I had not seen that requirement before.

"Then, maybe you should not go to France," she replied.

"I am going to France!" I yelled.

"Then, maybe, you should choose another university," she continued.

Another University. That was an option. I picked up all the leaflets I had gathered the months before and checked all the admission details. To my horror, every Translation public school required an extra selection exam to apply. How on Earth did I not see that? That day, I cried as if someone had stabbed my future, and I could see it bleeding and dying in front of me. My mother tried to help, but there was not much she could say. Still, an hour later, she found a solution, one we couldn't afford:

"What if you went to a private school?" She said, handing me one of the leaflets I had put aside weeks before. 

"We cannot pay that," I told her, refusing to grab the paper.

"You could do the first year there and then transfer to public."

"We cannot pay that," I repeated.

"We can pay one year," she said.

I took the shiny leaflet and looked at it. The old building looked fabulous, the facilities were incredible, and everyone was beautiful. Who would not like to go there?

I agreed with my mother to send the applications to that private school and, as a bonus, apply to another school closer to home because that's what everyone did those days: we needed a fallback scenario for the fallback scenario. For that "C plan," because I had no better idea, I chose the same course my boyfriend was taking. It did not matter anyhow. I sent all my paperwork and forgot about university for a month. I had gone through a year of "last pushes," enough exams for a lifetime, and all the nerves attached to choosing my future at seventeen. To make it even worse, my boyfriend and I broke up the day before my trip to France. I deserved a month out.

On a Saturday morning, I took a train and then a bus to arrive at my final destination. I had packed two suitcases first, but my mother said that taking so much stuff to the north of France in July made no sense, so I removed most of the warm stuff and reduced my luggage to one suitcase and a backpack. That turned out to be a tremendous mistake: a single pair of long jeans and one tricot jacket were not enough to spend that time in that part of the country. That was not a summer that could deserve such a name. That was a cold and rainy month to survive on shorts and tiny t-shirts. But, of course, I only learned about it when I was too late.

I arrived at the parking lot, where fifty other kids waited for the bus, and I started to speak with some of the girls. In fact, I had a lot of time to talk with many people since we spent more than fifteen hours on that bus, more than enough to get an idea of who would be who during the month that we would spend together. When we reached our destination, we were picked up in another parking lot by our respective families and taken to our new homes.  

My family lived in a house in the city center. On the ground floor was the architecture studio of the family dad, and on the first floor was the mother's office, who was an art merchant. The house had three more floors, with twisted wooden stairs leading to different decorations, eclectic furniture, weirdly slanted flooring that perfectly matched the various sizes of rooms, and a shocking lack of doors in most of them. 

The couple had three kids: two boys, aged seventeen and nineteen, and a girl of twenty. My huge bedroom belonged to the younger one, who spent his summer working in Paris. It was on the last floor, with its own lounge, a great window, a huge bed, and a massive Pulp Fiction poster as a header, from where Uma Thurman would look down at me every night.

I was not the only student in that house that summer. A Chinese guy- Yun- participated in another exchange program similar to mine. His parents cultivated mushrooms in China, and that was the first time he was leaving his hometown. The third student in the house was John, an older English man who had decided to spend time in France to learn French to communicate with his fiancée's parents. The three of us were a funny addition to that family due to our different styles and poor communication skills. None of us mastered the French language at that point. 

Dinners were not only family time. Many nights, there were visitors. I got to know many people those days, family and friends, speaking about their businesses, travels around the world, and the importance of money in life. That was the first time I heard the phrase "money does not bring happiness," which seemed complete nonsense then, but I fully understand now, so many years later. After dinner, I used to go to "my siblings'" room to chill and speak until we felt it was time to sleep. 

That month of July, I had classes, trips, and activities as the leaflets had promised. I met new people and improved the language that was supposed to open my doors to the future, as my mother had told me. And I had to change my plans for the future, but everything was under control—or so I thought.

I returned home at the beginning of August to find my three acceptance letters, so I focused on my first option, the private one, and forgot about the other two for some weeks. Around the third week of August, I was reading the documentation of what would be my university, and my brain decided to prank me … or was it? The school I was to attend was in a province with another official language, and all the paperwork was in that language. There were no other documents, and suddenly, it hit me. I called the admissions department to check on a "minor" detail:

"I was curious about the papers I received. What is the language used during the classes?"

"Well,' I heard from the other side, "the foreign languages are taught in those respective languages."

"And the rest?" I continued nervously

The woman paused a little bit as if she was surprised by such a question, but she replied with no doubt in her words:

"In the same language as the papers you received, of course."

My heart sank.

There was no chance I would be able to have a high enough grade that would allow me to secure a second year in public school. There was no money. That was not an option. I thanked the lady on the other side of the call and hung up. I had let the other choices run out of time. I had no school enrollment and no other options for the year. I called my third option, which was never supposed to be, and they told me it was possible to attend that year.

That's how it all started, and that's why I became an engineer: I got to skip town for one month, and it changed my life forever. Seems that my mother was right.