What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

At 8, I wanted to be a teacher because I loved my Hindi teacher and wanted to be exactly like her. I don’t remember much from that age, but I remember her classroom, and I remember wanting to make someone feel the way she made me feel.

At 11, I started learning French, and the dream shifted almost immediately. Now I wanted to be a French teacher. At 14, it was translator. By the time I finished school, I wanted to be a psychologist, in French. By the time I finished college, I wanted to be a diplomat. And by the time I finished my internship working with actual diplomats, the dream had narrowed into something specific: I wanted to work at the Embassy of France.

At 22, I got to do exactly that.

What I do now sits at a strange, rather wonderful intersection of all those younger ambitions. I don’t teach French in a classroom, but I spend my days counselling students, sometimes in French, about France, walking them through course structures and visa processes that are really just the paperwork of a much bigger decision. Whether it’s a public university, a grande école, or a specialised master’s, the conversation is rarely just about the course. It’s about a student trying to picture an entire life on the other side of it.

I’m not a psychologist, but a large part of this job is listening closely enough to hear what a student is really asking when they ask about a university, a city, or a career path. I’m not a diplomat either, but every counselling session is, in its own small way, a piece of the Indo-French relationship: one student, one conversation, one decision at a time. Multiply that by the hundreds of students we see each year, and it starts to look like how two countries actually stay connected.

This is what people mean when they talk about people-to-people exchange.

Looking back, I don’t think any single one of those younger versions of me had it entirely right. We rarely know what we’ll end up doing. But somewhere along the way, one thing stuck, quietly, in the least expected way, and carried me here without my fully realising it.

For me, it was French. I just didn’t know yet what shape it would take, or that it would lead me into international education and diplomacy rather than a classroom.

I don’t know what shape it takes next. But I’m paying closer attention this time.