It isn’t easy sometimes being French. The events of September 11 and France’s opposition to the war in Iraq weigh on people’s minds.”I was working as a waitress at Lonestar Steakhouse,” FAU senior Marine Bourbin recalls, “and twice I had the experience of people asking to get another waitress and asked to talk to the manager just because I was French.” At FAU, Bourbin also had a hard time finding friends when she arrived in the fall of 2002. “I started to sympathize with a few people at school but when I told them I was French, they slowly didn’t talk to me anymore. It was a tough period,” she recalls. After Bourbin’s father obtained a green card that would permit him to work in the U.S., her family decided to move to Florida. Bourbin arrived at FAU three years ago able to speak just a few English words.
The move to Fort Lauderdale had been planned for the end of September 2001. “My Dad had some business relationships in Fort Lauderdale, and he wanted to create his own business,” Bourbin says. “But the plan got turned down when the events of September 11 happened.”
The family had sold its house, car and business to move to Florida and was left with nothing in France, she says. But, “my Dad’s relationships in Florida told him it wasn’t a good moment for him to come,” Bourbin says. In just a few days they had to come up with a new plan before they had to vacate their house in France, she says. “We had a house in Mexico where we used to go every summer, so we decided to take a year off and go live there,” she recalls.
Bourbin wanted to go to a university, but in the Mexican village where they then lived there were none, she says. She had to look for a job but, as with English, she knew only a few words of Spanish, “I was afraid no one would hire me since I didn’t speak the language.”
Bourbin decided to study Spanish questions and answers that she might be asked in a job interview. “I wanted to be prepared to have a chance to get a position somewhere,” she says.
She then went to her first interview, which was for a bartender position in her village. “I knew enough Spanish to be able to go through the interview, but the manager thought I would speak better. He still hired me because he saw how motivated I was,” Bourbin recalls.
Though Bourbin had a great experience working the bar, she still wanted to go to a university. A year later, when things were doing better in the U.S., she went to Florida to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and SAT exams and, after succeeding, she got accepted for the fall of 2002 at FAU. Her parents, her brother and herself then moved to Fort Lauderdale.
Bourbin had a difficult time when she started at FAU. “I thought I spoke English pretty well. I had had an A on my baccalaureate back in France. But when I got here, I couldn’t understand anything. It was horrible,” she says.
As for her classes, Bourbin says it was a nightmare. “When I got to class, I always sat at the back of the class in a corner. I was so afraid that the teacher would ask me questions. And when a teacher did ask me a question, it was the end of the world. At the end of class, I would always be the first one through the door,” she says.
Bourbin use to spend hours studying her class books with a dictionary to help her out, she says. The effort paid off as she earned three As and a B, and made the Dean’s List the first semester.
But Bourbin’s father had better clients for his business in France, she says, and her parents decided to go back. “It was hard being left alone, but it gave me the courage to go see what was out there, and that’s how I started making friends,” Bourbin says.
She also had to find a place to live. “I wanted to have an American roommate so that I could speak English constantly and to learn more about the culture,” she says.
After a couple weeks of searching, she found a roommate. “He was the perfect roommate. We got along so well. He would always help me out with my English, even when I constantly bothered him by saying, ‘What does this mean?'” she says. “He was really supportive and comprehensive. Thanks to him I have learned so much,” Bourbin says. Bourbin was nicely surprised about the American education. “Teachers are really cooperative. They give you their e-mail and phone number and tell you that you can reach them whenever you need to. You would never see that in Europe,” she says.
She also really likes the fact that students are constantly put in real world situations, and that it is more practical than theoretical.
“The education system is so different here than it is in France. Over there you take more classes but only have two exams per year. Students usually don’t do any work until the exams. Here you have work to do every week, but at least you keep track of what you are doing, and you learn better,” Bourbin says.
Bourbin expects to graduate in May with a bachelor’s degree in marketing. After being on the Dean’s List over the years by keeping her GPA at 3.8, she recently was selected as one of the best students at FAU and therefore might be receiving a scholarship for her outstanding achievements throughout her FAU education.
“The true test of a superior academic student is their ability to go beyond what is asked in an assignment and incorporate outside information and concepts,” Jerry Juska, advertising professor at FAU, says. “Also, the comprehensiveness of a report that is also framed with original thinking and insights identifies an individual who has great academic potential. Based on my experiences with Marine Bourbin, she definitely fits that description.” “I left France when I was 18-years-old, thinking I knew it all, but now I see how much more I can learn. I thought I was going to go back to France after my B.A., but I love it so much here that I now want to do an M.B.A,” she says. Bourbin has been accepted to the University of Miami and will start graduate studies in the fall.
