Deux millions d'Erasmus - Marcel Musabimana

Marcel Musabimana, étudiant en management d’unités de production à l’Institut supérieur de Promotion Industrielle de Châlons-en-Champagne

"One day in the winter of 2009, I took the plane to make a stay in Brasov where the reputation of cold in winter is to be twice higher than no any other town in France in order to prepare my degree in charge of managing a unit of production and industrial innovation. The country is called Romania. TOTAL, the multinational oil company was going to welcome me in one of its service. That day, I was like a child who experiments for the first time the excitement of starting a summer camp, who is as much stressed as jubilant about the idea of discovering new way of living. Why did I choose Romania anyway? And what was my curiosity about this country before leaving ? In any case, I was far from suspecting what was going to happen to me!

I appreciated the welcome of the company. But my first astonishment was soon to ring out, one on the speed at which I was forced to start working. Indeed on this point I think their mentality on the work is quite different from the French. Because in France as a trainee, I am used to be taken from department to another just for presentations and this can take hours. It was none of this; within an hour after I arrived I started to work already. The title of the project was: "Develop a process optimized for recording temperature measurements in real time." I had to ensure that we could record an automatic temperature changes during various stages of the grease manufacture. Liters of coffee and countless sleepless nights were required for this project is done on time and meets the expectations of the company. But as regards the sleepless nights, not all have been dedicated to work, I spent some having fun with several of the Romanians with whom I had become acquainted.

I have come to understand why I chose this country. Romania is not as developed as the countries of Western Europe, is not a tourist destination, therefore Romanians are not used to welcome foreigners. I thus wanted to realize marks that the history in this country left (the Russian occupation), to know if their mentality is so different from ours. So I was first Bewildered when I noticed that some of the Romanians had never seen a person of colour. Talking with them has been a great help because it opened me out culturally and I helped others also in that way. As to the Russian occupation, apparently did not leave much scar because cities do not reflect this fairly recent period and evokes little for young people.

In any case, with hindsight, I realized that I could only rely on myself just being a hard worker. I was able to measure the importance of English in the business. Globalization leads to meet many nationalities and only one language can be spoken: English.

Professionally I had a project that will help me to build my future because it required a good project planning, a budget management and good communication within the team. Back in France I was able to integrate TI automotive, a multinational company which owns a plant in Poland."