August 2022 graduate Sara Marc will soon be heading to France as a TAPIF recipient
photo by Angela Foster
Sara Marc, an August 2022 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga graduate, had a decision to make.
Ms. Marc, who graduated from Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences in 2018, was recently accepted into the Teaching Assistant Program in France—an initiative coordinated through the Cultural Services division of the French Embassy in the United States.
Just days after learning that news, she found out she had also been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to France.
“It was a tough decision; I had two different placements and I had to decide,” said Ms.
Marc, who majored in French at UTC—receiving a bachelor’s degree in modern and classical languages and literatures with minors in education and political science.
While Ms. Marc gets to list Fulbright on her resume, the opportunities TAPIF has to offer, including “help with your master’s and programs where you can go back to France,” were too attractive to pass up.
“Both options are prestigious and I was going to have the same experience working as a teaching assistant, but I decided to go where I wanted to be," she said.
This fall, Ms. Marc is headed to Bordeaux, France, to be a teaching assistant and U.S. cultural ambassador as part of the TAPIF program. She has been placed in the Académie de Bordeaux at the secondary school level (middle and/or high school).
Her time as a UTC student included a study abroad semester in Lyon, France, in 2021 and being selected as a Gilman Scholar to France—a scholarship she had to decline due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.
Ms. Marc said her long-term goals include earning a master’s degree and working as a French teacher. The TAPIF opportunity will allow her to bring back curriculum education ideas for introducing foreign languages in all schools as early as kindergarten.
“Teaching abroad is going to help me learn a little bit more about the foreign language curriculum,” she said, “and how teaching English to early kids and younger kids, how it works and how I could bring that back to the United States.”