Moved From US to France for Graduate Degree. Best Decision of My Life.

• I wanted to go back to school for my master’s but didn’t want to go into enormous debt.
• I decided to go abroad and study at the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès in France.
• It was the best decision I ever made. I now live in Paris and have no plans to return to the US.

I never had a big plan to move to France.

I grew up in a pretty well-to-do New England town and was lucky enough to go to a quality high school where I was a straight-A honors student, yearbook editor, junior varsity field hockey captain — the works.

But sitting one weekday evening in a local neighborhood bar that I didn’t love but chose because it’d be empty, I didn’t feel fulfilled.

At the time, I was 22 years old and had been working a desk job in public relations for about two and a half years. It was a great gig. I was fresh out of college but had a decent salary, the green VW Beetle of my dreams, and plenty of time to travel and be with my friends.

Despite the fullness of my life, I felt like I was missing something. Although I had recently completed a triple major summa cum laude in four years, I felt like that something might be college.

I didn’t love my first college experience

I wanted a college do-over but going back to school in the US was not worth the expense, in my opinion.

Intellectually, I didn’t feel stimulated. The suburban campus was boring and too far away from any big-city opportunities.

Besides feeling like college was academically unfulfilling and professionally stifling, it was also socially drab.

I lived at my parents’ house, a 40-minute car ride from campus — hardly the setting for a movie-montage college experience.

The local state university I attended wasn’t my first choice, but I went there because it was in my parents’ budget, who paid for my tuition plus other expenses.

I am extremely lucky to have had my parents pay, but I knew it was a strain on them since I was the youngest of three, and they had also paid for my older siblings’ college tuition.

So years later, when I was feeling depressed and wondering what jigsaw piece was missing from my life, I thought: Maybe what I need is a college do-over — but this time, out of the suburbs where I can get some real intellectual and social stimulation.

However, the prospect of returning to school in the US was too expensive. So, I started to consider school abroad.

Doing a master’s in a foreign language in a foreign country was a challenge

At the time, I knew a friend who was doing her master’s in France.

“Maybe I’ll do that, too,” I told my mom over the phone during that boring weekday evening in the neighborhood bar. And that was it.

I ended up attending school in Toulouse.

There were difficult moments, embarrassing happenings, loneliness, and even a few tears. But it intellectually challenged me and opened my eyes to new mentalities.

So when I finished a master’s in creative writing at Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès in September 2024, I knew I had made the right decision.

When I had the original idea to do a master’s program in France, it wasn’t because I had always dreamt of living in France or wanted to leave my own country.

Truthfully, it was because I wanted to finally live the college experience I felt like I didn’t get the first time around.

For me, it was the most reasonable way to pursue a professionally superfluous graduate degree without taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

I now live in Paris

Settling permanently in France was never my original intent. But I’ve been in France for over three years and have also gotten married.

And while I never say never, I have no immediately foreseeable plans to move back to the US.

While nothing is perfect, and I miss things from back home, my standard of living is simply higher here.

This isn’t the right path for everyone, but it was the right one for me. I was able to pursue higher education for personal experience and fulfillment, not career advancement, and I didn’t have to go into debt for it.