Fatima Orozco ’16

I was born in Los Angeles, California, but spent a lot of my childhood traveling to Guadalajara, Mexico, where my parents are from. Before AUP, I’d never really gone anywhere else and even my neighborhood in Los Angeles was heavily Hispanic. I wasn’t really sure where I wanted to go when I applied to universities until I saw an ad for AUP. I decided to give it a shot and one visit to Paris later, I knew that I couldn’t go anywhere else.  

I’ve always been a computer geek and once I started learning more about the financial crisis of 2008, and taking courses such as “Investment Analysis” with Professor James Noel Ward, I became interested in finance as well and decided to declare a double major in Finance and Computer Science. It was only when I started applying to jobs that I saw how many doors were open to me because of what I studied. 

AUP isn’t just about academics. I helped build AUP’s Student Services Association (ASA), an ultimately unsuccessful venture that taught me a lot about how to create an organization in France. I also served as the Computer Science, Mathematics, and Environmental Sciences representative, helped found Liveware, a workshop where students teach each other basic programming tools, participated in the organization of AUP’s Finance Club, and volunteered. I was also lucky enough to participate in a number of internships. I was the Marketing and Communications Coordinator at an artificial intelligence software company called Yseop, became a web-content manager and customer service structuration intern at Selectra, a comparison site for energy providers, and for my last internship, worked as an IT project manager assistant at Ranger, a door-to-door sales company. I became increasingly interested in the business and logistics elements of the fashion and cosmetics community and have now landed a permanent contract with a modeling agency called IMG Models as a mainboard assistant, a position that has already presented multiple possibilities for my future.  

I’ve always been ambitious but AUP helped me place my goals within a more global framework. I love finding comfort in the unknown here, something which I think takes a kind of open-mindedness that AUP helps cultivate. I’ve also learned that no country or society is “right”, that the world is far, far more nuanced than that. All of my friends are from different countries and yet we have so much in common: we all wanted something different and we all wanted to explore.