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NEWS & FEATURES |
Interview of the Month – September 2001: Caroline Isautier-Rougeot (ESSEC 1993)
Q: What is your background ? I am a bi-cultural, dual French and Canadian national who has lived about half her life in North America, and the other half in France. Prior to obtaining the ESSEC degree, I obtained a BA in Economics from the University of Toronto as well the Sciences Po degree, specializing in Economics and Finance. I worked in Washington, DC at the start of my career, and later moved back to Paris, where I held marketing positions with Ogilvy and Mather and later with Bayard Presse. Publishing is my true passion. Q: Why did you decide to come and stay here? I have lived in about 10 different places over the past twenty years, first of all as the daughter of an expatriate, and later, on my own initiative, so moving is not new to me. What specifically prompted my latest move to Berkeley, CA in July 1999 was my husband's admission to the Haas MBA program and my own desire to leave Paris and its congested and stressful atmosphere. I had to give up a very interesting position as a Direct Marketing manager for ten of Bayard Presse's twenty-five children's publications, however. What I found here, on the other hand, was the New Economy, a world where the Internet was a way of life- almost a religion- and where not knowing HTML seemed backward. That's what led me to embark on the adventure of publishing an ambitious, data-base driven content and service web site for French-speaking and Francophile parents in the US: Frenchparents.com. The Internet was still very "macho" and very "young", I would say. I thought there were very few sites for women like me (despite the "Women.com" or " Femme.com" attempts) who were mature women, with children, and wanted to use all the Internet's power to find information as well as products and services adapted to their needs. It has been a true adventure, because my co-founder web designer and I had to put together an all-volunteer team comprised of a programmer, market analysts and editorial contributors, with no funding and long-distance cooperation (with one core team member in Grenoble, France, the other in Washington, DC and myself in Berkeley, CA). We finally launched our site two weeks ago, but boy did I send email! Q: What advice would you give to ESSEC graduates who would like to come to work here? To young ESSEC graduates, I would strongly recommend coming to the US. Finding a job should not be too difficult and the US is in a lot of ways more exciting for young professionals than France because of its quick and simple way of conducting business. For those with more than five years of experience and even more so with children, I would strongly recommend being transferred or hired in advance by a French-owned company- unless you also have a degree in Computer science!;-) Finding an equivalent position as the one you have in France is far from assured not only because the ESSEC name is not a household name here, but also because your experience in France will not be considered as directly applicable to the US & In addition, for women in particular, the workaholic culture of this country where one must first pay her dues by putting in long hours makes combining work with family obligations without a local "track record" a true "casse-tête". Q: How do you think your ESSEC background helped you to be where you are? After Sciences Po, like many of its graduates, I had opened up my mind so much I was not sure what I wanted to do. ESSEC allowed me to acquire confidence and management skills I wanted to apply. I was also able to attend the Chapel Hill MBA program in my second year as part of an exchange program. In France, ESSEC was instrumental in helping me obtain very fulfilling positions. Q: What do you consider as you role in the ESSEC family? While in Washington, DC, I contributed two articles to Reflets ESSEC, a very professional and informative yet unpretentious publication I enjoyed reading as a link to ESSEC in France. When I was in Paris, I was quite active with the ESSEC Alumni Association, in particular its "International Club". I proposed and followed through the creation of a special directory for " international" ESSEC graduates- those with an " international" background, either at a personal level and/or at a professional level- because I thought the current directory did not allow one to see these types of backgrounds at first glance. It was impossible to see that a person listed as living in Paris had previously worked in Asia for five years. So I still consider my role in the ESSEC family as that of an active member. Thank you ...
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