International mobility

I spent the spring semester of 2026 in San Francisco on Learn2Launch, the graduate entrepreneurship programme run at UC Berkeley, from 30 January to 30 April: thirteen weeks in residence. The programme takes a team from ideation to prototype over a single semester, combining lectures and workshops with visits to incubators, accelerators and venture funds, and it is delivered entirely in English to a cohort drawn from several countries.

What made the experience demanding was not the language in the abstract. I hold a C1 certification and had no difficulty following the teaching. The difficulty lay in register. Customer discovery asks you to conduct an unscripted conversation in which the person opposite is under no obligation to make things easy for you, and American professional English moves at a pace, and with an economy of formulation, that a French speaker trained on written English does not automatically possess. My first interviews were too polite and too structured; I asked closed questions because they were safer, and I came away with confirmations rather than information.

What corrected it was preparation of a specific kind. Rather than rehearsing whole sentences, I prepared openings and the two or three follow-ups most likely to be needed, which freed enough attention during the conversation to listen properly instead of composing my next line. By the end of the semester I was running discovery calls without a script and, more usefully, I had learned to sit through a silence rather than fill it, which is where the substance of an interview tends to arrive.

My second year of master's study is the MSc X-HEC Entrepreneurs, run jointly by HEC Paris and École Polytechnique from September 2025 to August 2026. The cohort numbers 120 students of 29 nationalities, and the programme is taught in English throughout; the Berkeley semester above is one of its own exchange tracks.

The method is learning by doing, and the year is built around formative missions carried out for real companies in teams. English is therefore not a course requirement to be satisfied but the working condition of the deliverables: the interviews, the internal exchanges, the documents produced and the final defence are all conducted in it.

On the first of these missions, an exploration assignment judged across forty teams, my team took the Public Prize for belOOp, a venture we scoped by interviewing prospective users and then abandoning our initial hypothesis when the interviews failed to support it. The exercise was as much about conducting research in a second language as about the venture itself: an interview yields nothing if you cannot hear what is being said between the answers, and hearing that in English took longer to acquire than the vocabulary did. [à vérifier] — add the nationalities of your teammates here if the team was mixed; a named composition is stronger evidence than a claim about the cohort.

At Radion, where I worked on data infrastructure for prediction markets between 2025 and 2026, the market was American from the outset. English was consequently the operating language of the company rather than an occasional one: the product, its documentation, its users and the communities they gathered in were all English-speaking.

In practice this meant commercial calls and customer interviews conducted in English with users based mainly in the United States, and a research pipeline built over some four hundred thousand messages drawn from English-language Discord communities, from which I extracted the recurring problems worth building against. I also organised the first French meetup dedicated to prediction markets, which brought together speakers from Kalshi and Hyperliquid and was conducted in English for an audience of practitioners.[à vérifier] — an approximate number of interviews and the period they span would strengthen this; a figure is worth more than none.

ENSEEIHT requires seventeen weeks in total for FISE students, of which at least twelve must be physical mobility abroad. The Berkeley semester satisfies the physical requirement on its own at thirteen weeks; the remaining four are covered several times over by the master's programme, which runs in English for the rest of the year. The Radion weeks are concurrent with the master's and are recorded here as context rather than added to the total.

• Learn2Launch certificate or attestation of attendance
• Proof of the stay in the United States, 30 January to 30 April 2026
• Attestation that the MSc X-HEC Entrepreneurs is taught in English
• TOEIC, 975/990 (C1), January 2024