L.A. to Paris and London: French degree helps alumna forge international career

Kate McCutchen is surrounded by packing boxes. She appears on Zoom from London, where she is moving into the house she recently bought with her British partner. It’s a far cry from the converted church she shared with friends when she first decamped to London from Paris in 2007, after landing a job with Apple.

McCutchen’s ability to live in both European capitals has been made possible by the international career she has forged, progressing from big names in tech and finance to luxury retail. She couldn’t have done any of it, she says, without her undergraduate degree.

“None of this would have happened if I hadn’t done my B.A. in French at USC Dornsife. That’s the foundation on which my career has been based.”

A happy accident

Describing herself as “an accidental French major,” McCutchen says that “like every liberal arts student in the world, I wanted to do about 97,000 things — from theatre to international relations.” But after switching majors several times, she realized the one constant in her academic life was her French classes.

“I loved French. I loved the language and I knew I wanted to live in France, so, at the end of my sophomore year, I looked at everything and thought, ‘I’ve been a French major this whole time without realizing it.’”

McCutchen says she always knew her ultimate goal was to live abroad. The big question was “how am I going to get there?”

First, she knew she had to get out of Los Angeles.

“I knew I wanted to live in Europe, and I knew if I didn’t leave L.A. that I wasn’t going to because I had so many fabulous friends from USC, and I could see that I would have a wonderful life if I stayed.”

So, after earning her degree, McCutchen moved to Washington, D.C., where she landed a job with Air France as a check-in agent at Washington-Dulles Airport.

Getting to Europe

By then McCutchen had worked out that there were two paths to being able to live and work in Europe: Do a master’s degree at a European university and aim to get recruited from there or apply to U.S. companies, try to work her way up and get transferred. Her impatience, she says, made her opt for the first.

In 2005, she moved to Paris, where she earned an MBA the following year at the prestigious international business school HEC.

“I think that there is a beauty in the critical thinking, and the diversity of skills that a liberal arts degree provides. For me, following that with a practical degree, like an MBA, was the perfect combination.”

After earning her MBA, McCutchen landed an internship with Apple in Paris before being hired full-time at their European headquarters in London. She then moved to Samsung for two years before relocating to Luxembourg to work for Amazon.

She returned to London nine years ago to help set up the European marketing team for Amazon Media Group and later to help launch their international grocery delivery, then spent three years helping to launch the mobile payment company Square in the U.K.

She joined the luxury luggage and travel accessories retailer, Away, in March 2020, to run their U.K. and European business.

Love at first sight

Kate McCutchen with her parents at her 2004 graduation from USC Dornsife. (Photo: Courtesy of Kate McCutchen.)

Born in Atlanta, McCutchen’s family moved to Texas when she was 8. Over the next nine years, the family moved to several small towns in the Lone Star State. By the time she turned 17, she was raring to get out.

McCutchen says she has her parents to thank for sparking her wanderlust, but it was her first overseas trip to Paris when she was 15 that cemented her love affair with travel.

Among her memories of that trip are savoring the sea food platter at the legendary Paris brasserie Le Terminus and staying in a tiny hotel on the Left Bank where the power regularly went out and where her mother got stuck in the tiny 19th-century Parisian elevator that only held one person at a time.

McCutchen was struck by the Parisian way of life — from the exquisite food to being able to simply step outside her front door and be in the middle of a vibrant city where she felt that anything could happen.

“Coming from towns in the States where you drive from strip mall to strip mall, to arrive in a city where you have buildings that are older than the country that I grew up in, and you can walk in any direction — or even in the same direction — and have a different experience every single day: It was that serendipitous experience of life being something that you can experience by chance that I loved, and couldn’t wait to get back to.”

From Voltaire to practical business

Upon hearing about USC’s Residential Honors Program, which enables high school students to apply in their junior year and complete their senior year concurrently with their freshman year of university, McCutchen leapt at the chance.

She was attracted to majoring in French, she says, by the fact that it gave her what she describes as “a perfect balance of both the philosophical and the practical.”

The breadth of classes was also a big draw. In addition to studying Baudelaire and Voltaire, critical thinking and writing, McCutchen was also able to take practical business courses as well as courses in contemporary French cinema and culture.

“My business French class was one of the most valuable classes I ever took,” she says. “I use what I learned in that class to this day if I’m working in French or I’m in a French environment. My degree taught me to think and be able to flex in so many different directions. That has been priceless throughout my career.”

McCutchen says her degree also gave her an incredible grounding in understanding another culture.

“It’s given me a wonderful basis in rational thought and the ability to adapt to situations. It gives you that ability to approach a problem that you’ve never faced before and know, ‘Okay, I can reason my way through this. I can figure this out.’”

Asked for advice on pursuing an international career, McCutchen says she would encourage people to be creative.

“My career has not been linear and I’ve never had a plan,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to go in a nonlinear fashion because actually what you’ll find over time is that you’ll see a path afterwards, and that will help inform the future. You don’t have to start with the path.

“Business French was a class I took because it sounded interesting, and it was life-changing. So, take things that sound interesting. You never know when you’re going to find the one that changes your life.”

A donor to USC Dornsife’s Department of French and Italian, McCutchen says she wants to give others the same opportunities.

She is also keen to dispute stereotypes about liberal arts degrees.

“I hope the pendulum is swinging back, but for a bit there, it was all about degrees needing to be practical. ‘Liberal arts are dead,’ all of that. I hope I’m proof that’s not the case.”