Brief Intro
French major and Business Studies Minor, Baker Scholars Program, CORP member, born and raised in Los Angeles
Why I decided to major
So I will be fully honest and say that I chose the French major because I got a 5 on my high school AP test and realized that I had a gift with languages. I never thought I was fluent (still don’t) but realized that I was able to get to a higher level than my peers and I wanted to pick a niche major to get into a good school. That is the honest answer.
I never thought I would actually stick with the major once I got into Georgetown, but I decided that I would deal with that hurdle once I came across it. My plan was to apply to schools as a French major, demonstrate my ability to learn a new language and then switch to another major during my Freshman year.
Why I stuck with it
So my Freshman year rolled around and I knew it was time to make my move. According to the college, you had to stick with your major for one full year which was upsetting, but I didn’t mind getting the extra French practice and I actually kind of liked my French courses. During my Freshman year I explored sociology, justice and peace studies, theology and lots of other social sciences to find another major to pick up. In these classes, while I learned a lot, nothing challenged my brain like my French classes. I felt silly talking about my weekend and learning the subjunctive in French classes when my peers were doing analytical essays on famous black artists from the Harlem Renaissance. Nevertheless, I realized that the French major actually worked my brain in a way that the social sciences did not. I could write a paper in my sleep, but writing that same paper in French? It re-wired my brain in a way that intrigued me.
I decided to stick with the major but explored adding a harder skill to supplement. I explored the French major with Business Coursework, but didn’t find anyone who had done the program in a long time so I talked long and hard with my parents and decided that I wanted to learn business as a harder skill to be employable but keep the major. I wanted to double major, but didn’t want to make my college experience miserable so I decided to apply to the Business Studies Minor and see if I got in alongside the Baker Scholars Program which is for liberal arts majors interested in business. I got into both and was extremely grateful and tailored my Business Studies minor towards harder skilled classes like Accounting, Business Financial Management, Statistics, and Entrepreneurship to teach me the harder skills of business to feel “well-rounded”. I’m glad I had the Baker Scholars Program and Business Studies Minor to learn how to apply my love of languages into the world of business and honestly make myself feel more “employable”.
To make a long story short, I stuck with the major after learning that the requirements were not as stringent as I thought and I would be forced to study abroad. I knew I always wanted to study abroad, but liked that it was baked into the major. I went to France twice, once for the summer program in Tours/Paris and another through CUPA in Paris and was extremely grateful for the opportunity. It was through my study abroad experiences that my French dramatically improved and when I considered myself courant.
Thoughts after
I graduated in May 2024 with no job prospects and a lot of self-inflicted stress. I was on the waitlist for a Fulbright to Hungary and eagerly wanted to get off, but looked into computational linguistics and thought about how to use my language major in this LLM (large language model) boom. I was blessed to get off the waitlist for the Fulbright in June where I researched the intersection of business, language and culture in the Budapest startup ecosystem and now I am currently a startup founder of a Language Learning community. While I am still unsure about my future, language skills are always useful and I have been able to build an 80 person online community as well as find jobs that require fluency in a second language (LA 2028 olympics being one of them). So while the path is by no means traditional, your love of languages will not only set you apart, but force you to think outside of the box when it comes to cross cultural communication and job opportunities in the future.
(11/25/2025)