From the Sciences Po Law School to the French Embassy in Washington D.C.

After getting my bachelor’s degree at Sciences Po's Paris campus, I decided to join the law school, more specifically the "Economic law" track (which in fact gives you access to a much broader range of classes than this name suggests). At the time, I contemplated trying for the bar and becoming a lawyer, but I was also interested in diplomacy and public service in general. I thought that, in any case, getting a legal background would be useful no matter which career I eventually chose. Looking back, joining the law school was the best academic decision I made at Sciences Po.

After the Sciences Po law school (I graduated in 2020), I joined the College of Europe to get a dual master’s degree with this school of European Union affairs, located in Belgium, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in the United States. This two-year program allowed me to specialize in EU law during the first year and to take international relations classes during the second. It also ended with a compulsory internship, and I did mine at the European Union Delegation to the United Nations. After that, I started my current job as a Trade policy attaché at the French Embassy in Washington D.C.

I would differentiate between the first and the second year of the Economic law degree. The first year was more challenging and tedious. I had almost no knowledge of French law before joining the school, and next thing I knew 90% of my time at Sciences Po was dedicated to reading and discussing legal texts. It seemed like there was a lot of catching up to do with the students who - inside or outside the Sciences Po law school - had started learning about the law years ago, right after getting their Baccalaureate. For this reason, the first year was more constraining in terms of the classes you could pick. The second year was very different. With most people taking a gap year between these two years, they get a better idea of what they want to specialize in. For my part, after an internship in the Trade policy section of the French Permanent Representation to the European Union, I was certain I wanted to work in public service, but I also knew I loved international economic law. So I chose the Global Governance Studies track, which notably gave me access to international trade law classes. The second year was less intense, and although I kept learning a lot, I felt freer to organize my time how I wanted. In parallel to my studies, I did an internship at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and started working as a consultant at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Although I work at the French Embassy, my employer is not the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but the Ministry of Economics and Finance, which maintains a network of offices throughout the world to defend France's economic interests abroad. Within the Trade policy section, the bulk of my work consists in reporting on any and all trade-related developments within the United States, i.e. any legislative change or political event that could affect trade between the US and France (and more broadly the European Union). We maintain contact with US authorities, French authorities in Paris, French firms who trade with the US, the European Union Delegation here in Washington, local think tanks, and academics… Our interlocutors are varied and the work is always very current, at the crossroads of law, economics, and diplomacy. It’s exhilarating, especially now that trade is increasingly used as a geopolitical tool at the international level and is intertwined with global issues like climate change and human rights.

Do not only study the law, practice it as well! Join a law clinic, do internships - in law firms and beyond - , try different things out, and don’t forget that there are alternatives to strictly legal professions after the law school. Chances are your law background will be valued in other places as well: as long as you figure out what you would like to use it for, you will be good at selling it on the job market.