What a day...

Hey Charlie!

I am here today to talk to you about the European day of languages that took place last Friday in Marseille! As there has already been an article dedicated to this event, I will not get into much detail about what that day was about. I am just going to tell you about my experience there. 

So on Friday the 25th, I had an appointment at 2pm so I had to leave school early in order to make it there. Afterwards, my friends told me that they had heard that there were some celebrations going on at the “Old Port”, so I decided to join them there. Once we arrived, we could not find anything out of the ordinary, so we had to ask some strangers, until finally we found a man that looked like he was participating in the event. Therefore, we decided to follow him as he entered the “Palais de la Bourse”. Once we were in the building, we asked a concierge to guide us to the “festivities”. She guided us to the chamber of deputies of the Urban community of Marseille. As we entered the house, a woman asked us whether we had come to take the TOEIC test or not. Being unaware of what that was, I answered yes and we ended taking the exam, which by the way, we aced. :)

After finishing the exam, the woman gave us the answers and we found out that we had been the only ones to actually pass the exam ( and we were in the room together with some law and business majors that were 4 years older than us! Not to be rude, but they had a the level of a basic Seconde (10th Grade) student). 

After taking the test, I saw that a conference was being held in the same building, so I decided to stay there and participate in it. When the time came to enter the room, I went in and saw that I was the only “young” person there. Most people were in their 40’s maybe 50’s, and they were all sharply dressed ( while I was wearing a graphic tee-shirt, had long messy hair, and had a messy teenage beard). I sat at the front of the room and waited for the conference to start. The conference was about languages and employment in private firms” and most of the discussions were about how languages are taught in France ( and how flawed our education system is). We tried to understand why we were so bad at languages and how we could fix our learning problems. We also discussed the importance of languages and education in globalisation and in companies that had to deal with foreign countries often. To help the debate, some impressive people were invited to the conference. The Professor Claude Hagège, who was a professor as the “College de France” was invited, along with Jean-Claude Lasnier who worked for the European Commission, Cécile Loyer, who was a marketing director for Mendelez and Danon before being the head of marketing of Cambridge France, Valérie Scaglia, who is a business manager for the CMA-CGM, and the CEO of Kangooroo enterprises which is a consulting firm based in Paris. The debate was very interesting and quite long (over three hours), therefore I am going to try to write another article about it (in more details). All you need to know for now, is that I grabbed my courage with both hands and I defended the interests of all international sections in France. I got a lot of positive feedback from my “speech” from the speakers and the audience which made me really proud (all modesty aside ;) ).

After the conference ended, I decided to stay to do some sort of “lobbying”. Hence, I just stood outside of the room and waited for each of the speakers to come out. Thanks to this lobbying, I got a lot of information on UCAS and how to write a good personal statement (thanks to Mrs. Loyer), and I also got a couple of business cards from the people there ( and I am currently trying to get an internship with those people.) 

As I was talking to the CEO of Kangooroo, Professor Hagège over heard me speaking French and thought that I had a Dutch accent. He came up to me and we started talking about English and education in general. After a while, all the other people who had come to the conference had left, and I was left alone with the speakers. Here I was, my 16 years old self, messy looking and totally unprepared, talking to people that I had never expected to meet about subjects that I had almost never thought about. 

Luckily for me, they appreciated my company and they invited me to dinner. So I left the chamber of commerce along with business men and knowledgeable people, who had thought that I was interesting enough be worthy of their time. As we were walking down the street, people would stop to talk to Professor Hagège, whom I called Claude because we had a good friendship going on, and that it when I discovered that he was actually kind of “famous”. This made me laugh because actual adults were coming up to him and asking him great questions, yet he blew them off to talk to a teenager (although I think the speakers forgot I was a minor because they kept trying to serve me wine and liquor.) 
Overall, I had a great night and I definitely learned a lot of things from talking to them. They really motivated me to try my best, as they had done to get to where they are today. Talking to them made me very confident, and it convinced me of what I want to do. They all told me to that we were really lucky to be in the OIB, and that our hard work would pay off. They had all gone to prestigious French schools, and they told me that we had a lot of chances of getting in! So for those of you who are feeling like they can't do it, or who are  thinking about giving up, just know that we are doing something great with our lives, and that even if it is very painful now, it will reward us in our futures as post-graduate students and later employees.
I will write another article with more details as soon as I can.

Also, the whole conference was filmed by a professional crew, so I'll put the link with the video and pictures and soon as I have them (so you can see me try to defend OUR professors ;) )

Nathan