Space Engineer and Scholarship Recipient: Egg Skull at Harvard

For this native of Tahiti, good news came after getting into his MBA: a Sachs scholarship! Each year, about ten French people benefit from this scholarship, created in 1901 by Harvard graduate Arthur Sachs, whose family co-founded Goldman Sachs Bank. Since the late 1950s, the Sachs Scholarships have aimed, according to the will of their founder, “to help create forever the best relations between our two countries and to ensure that a certain number of young French people will be able to become successful in the future.” Concerning the Intellectual Elite Studies at Harvard”.

“In the early years, the scholarship covered all tuition fees; without it, some would not have been able to get into Harvard. Today, it is less,” says Gautier, who until last year chaired the scholarship holders’ alumni association. Was. Candidates (about a hundred per year) come from very diverse backgrounds and aim for very different experiences at Harvard. There are researchers, authors, publishers, professors, one of whom, Dominic Mosi, is now a professor at Harvard. Once accepted, scholarship recipients often find themselves under the wing of mentors, professors or researchers whose support will allow them to complete projects in France or the United States.

The application is carried out in several stages: the file, the decision in the pre-commission, and the final commission, the latter being “a bit theatrical”, believes Gautier: the finalists present their project and their inspiration within the framework of the Cercle interallié, with a commission bringing together veterans, including the daughter of Arthur Sachs or cultural advisor to the United States Embassy in France.

Read other episodes of this series

Episode 1: From basketball to cancer research: a French woman’s surprising itinerary at Harvard
part 2: Graduate then MBA: A repeat offender at Harvard
Part 3: One Foot in France, One Foot in the United States: A Franco-American at Harvard
Episode 4: Japanese by Birth, French by Adoption: A Francophile at Harvard
Episode 5: Disabled Becomes a Harvard Researcher on His Own Illness: A Gifted Journey

reasoning about concrete problems

For Gautier, Harvard was a real culture shock, in the good sense of the word. “After my preparation, I did Central, then spent 18 wonderful months at MIT. [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NDLR], After that I worked in space engineering, at ESA and then at Airbus. Obviously, I spent my time with the scientists, the people in space. At Harvard, the MBA trained Gautier in “an entirely different challenge: the ability to reason, structure, and communicate on a concrete problem”. Whereas in my universe of scientists, if we opened our mouths it was because we were certain of the correct answer.” Americans are comfortable with Harvard Business School’s case study method.

It is this double training, scientific and practical, that today allows him to be responsible for business development at Loft Orbital, a brilliant Franco-American start-up satellites based in New York. But Gautier also benefits from his “Sachs experience,” especially from his network of former scholarship holders. “Not in the transactional sense, that’s not the feeling at all. But on an intellectual level: there are a lot of researchers, philosophers, we meet for the pleasure of discussion”. Which, originally, was the aim of Francophile Arthur Sachs.