Choosing a career path was simple when I was four, perhaps because wanting to become a butterfly represented so many things I admired: the lightness of being, freedom without fear, and big, colourful wings. Now, no longer aspiring to be a butterfly, my aim is to embark on a path toward a foundation degree in English law in a program with an international focus. I believe a career in law offers a far more interesting, and relevant, set of tools to the improvement of society and the world that I share with some six billion other people.

As child of Franco-American parents, I have always been a keen observer of the world I live in. I have studied how distant the poles of development between countries can be. In studying these disparities in my Economics and Social Sciences program, and reading works such as Thomas Bingham's "Rule of Law", I am led to the question of the roles of law and justice play in the development of societies.

When I read The Economist or Alternatives Economiques, I see how the application of law can nonetheless be subjective, resulting in an imperfect, or ambiguous, form of justice - for example, though the financial crisis has imposed severe burdens on many citizens and their governments, few laws actually appear to have been broken. I wonder about how transparent our law-based democracies truly are, noticing how the emergence of whistleblowers is applauded in blogs and the rhetoric of politicians, but how their actions were born in a legal void. The status of individuals such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden remains undefined and therefore neither protected nor prosecutable.

I have also taken an interest in how newer fields of law - dealing with privacy, liability and equal opportunity, for example - have become central to addressing societal disparities. Ensuring the continued relevance of the foundation works of law, and building new applications for them, represents a huge intellectual, and professional, challenge and adventure for me.

Legal scholarship by John Locke and Edmund Burke on natural law, combined with the extensive jurisprudence offered by Common Law, have positioned the English legal system as one of the pillars of international relations, business and finance. I undertook a work-experience internship with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and learnt about tax and transfer pricing under various legal regimes. I expanded my exposure to the practice of commercial law during a non-mandatory internship last summer with White & Case in Paris.

Competition and community are integral parts of my own ecosystem, and in my extra-curricular life, I compete for the school in inter-school tournaments on the basketball team. My desire to continue living and studying in the UK is reinforced by the strong sense of community I have enjoyed and had the privilege to be a part of. I recently power-walked the MoonWalk, completing a half-marathon, and participated in raising funds for breast cancer research.

In looking back at my younger self, I sometimes wonder what made me announce my life's ambitions so early. I believe that to study Law and to help develop modern applications of timeless legal precepts for today's changing world is the greatest contribution I can make to my own development, and, hopefully, to the society that I have chosen to live in.