SKEMA

During my time at NC State I lived in a small house relatively close to the college campus. We lived about halfway up quite a steep hill, with a large apartment complex at the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill. In September 2010, the beginning of my sophomore year at school, I began to notice large groups of unusually-dressed students walking up and down the hill at all times of the day. Even so close to a large college campus, the surrounding areas of Raleigh are distinctly suburban, so this pedestrian behavior was perplexing. In the suburban United States, walking usually signifies that someone is too poor to afford a car, while these people were obviously not. They sported dark, stylish clothes and accessories seldom seen in a medium-sized city in the American South known for its historically agricultural and technical university. Something was afoot.

I asked around until finally one of my friends told me, "Oh yeah, I think there's some sort of French school here now! They've got a ton of new exchange students." As soon as I heard this, making friends with the new French students became an all-consuming goal. I think my interest was a combination of several factors. I regretted not having made any French friends during my time in Paris. At the time, if I had returned to Paris I would not have even known anyone to stay with. How disappointing to have to say that after nearly 7 months there. I also had not found very many potential friends during my first year at NC State, due in part to its historically agricultural and technical status and the students this tended to attract. I suspected that I might be able to find friends among the French who held more similar worldviews to mine. Lastly, a great deal of it was due simply to my, as much as I might not want to identify it as such, Francophilia. 

Through a friend of a friend we soon garnered an invitation to a party held by some of the French students living in the apartments down the street. It turned out that a French business school, SKEMA, had chosen NC State as the partner university for its satellite campus. More than just a study abroad exchange program, SKEMA had leased a building on our engineering campus with facilities for several hundred students to study in the United States while directly enrolled in SKEMA. This was the first satellite campus partnership of this sort by a French business school on American soil. The students were mostly housed in large apartment complexes within walking distance of their school building. 

Thanks to both proximity and to my continued persistence, as the semester wore on I grew closer to the same group of students who hosted that first party (and many more after that). I had been quite lucky in finding what I had hoped for: friends who thought about and saw the world in a similar way to myself. These students would leave after just one semester, so I decided to become more deeply involved with the SKEMA/NC State partnership while I remained in Raleigh. During my junior year I committed to be an orientation guide and unofficial "welcome buddy" for the incoming students. Through this position I was able to again meet a friendly and open-minded group of people. 

It was almost entirely due to these positive experiences with the SKEMA students that I considered returning to France again upon graduation. As we'll see later, the French education system has many fundamental differences from the American system, but these SKEMA students I was meeting were graduate students in both my perspective and theirs. Why shouldn't I go to SKEMA myself after undergraduate? I'd certainly have a good chance of being accepted, with a long track record of working with the school and its students. And my economics degree would be perfect as a basis for further business studies. In the summer of 2012, I began to look into the application process.