Machine à laver. That was the term — French for “laundry machine” — that Sofia Bazant was searching for when she described the appliance as a “dishwasher for clothes” to her French host family.
A then-junior in high school, Bazant spent the year in Le Cateau-Cambrésise, France, taking classes at le Lycée (the high school) Camille Desmoulins and delving into the local culture.
Now, as a senior double-majoring in French studies and communications, Bazant credits her time abroad at 17 years old as the driving force behind her interest in French studies.
“I lived with a host family for one year and [was] completely immersed in French everything, and I left fluent at the end of that year,” Bazant said. “And that’s why I decided to keep doing some French at Wake [Forest], because I wanted to make sure that I still had French in my life.”
However, this was not her only experience living in France. In fact, Bazant had first lived in Paris when she was six years old, while her father was working at a university in the city. In anticipation of this move, she had been enrolled in a bilingual preschool in Boston, Mass., where she began her French education.
“I got there, and I went to a public French first grade, and I used my French all year, and I was completely fluent when I left,” Bazant said. “People didn’t know that I was American — I really had the French accent.”
But once her family moved back to California, Bazant’s commitment to the language waned.
“I stopped using my French,” she said. “My parents signed me up for after-school lessons, and I never wanted to go. I hated learning all the grammar and everything, and then I just took it in middle school like everyone else did. It wasn’t really interesting to me, but in high school, I decided that I really wanted to lean into French.”
After returning from her year abroad, Bazant graduated high school and entered Wake Forest during a time of immense uncertainty. Given the change that she had experienced in her life after moving throughout Massachusetts, California and France, Bazant was excited at the opportunity to find a new community in Winston-Salem.
“I lived in five different towns in Massachusetts, [lived] twice in California [and] twice in France,” she said. “Every time, I’ve been able to find friends that I really liked and keep up with those people, and I think that that’s something — there’s the community aspect of connecting with people through language.”
“I think that that also led me to Wake [Forest], because Wake [Forest] is a smaller school,” she continued. “I definitely looked at larger state schools, but I thought I would really appreciate having a smaller community where I could know more people.”
And over the past four years, Bazant did find this community. Some of her fondest memories that she recalled from her time at Wake Forest were spent with her friends, many of whom she met through the French department.
“I already look back on my last three years of Pit dinners with my friends, and that has been the most important aspect of my Wake Forest experience,” she said. “Every single night, all my friends and I would go to the Pit, and it was our time to catch up on everything and just talk about our lives.”
When thinking about the future, Bazant hopes to use her French education and interests in communication and design to live and work abroad. Even in the face of uncertainty as to what the next few years will look like, Bazant is confident in her ability to foster the type of community that she found on campus.
“I’m really excited to live independently and start over again in a new place,” she said. “I feel like I’ve had my four years in [Winston-Salem], and I’ve really loved [it]. But I’m also excited to start in a new city, and I’m excited by the fact that I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet.”
