Bonjour (hello)! Demat deoc’h (hello)! My name is Maxwell Pirtle, and I’m from Long Island, NY. I come from a family who has always loved to travel. I remember hearing stories from my grandma who traveled the world for work. From camel-back riding in front of pyramids in Egypt, to the ash raining from the sky on her shoulders in the Philippines after Mount Pinatubo erupted to living in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s, her travel experiences were unforgettably fascinating. My parents enjoyed that same excitement to travel, and I was fortunate that they brought me all over the United States, the Caribbean and Europe.
My travels inspired me to plan my own adventures. My French teacher in middle school had encouraged me to someday visit France, and in 2023 I did just that! I spent six months abroad in Rennes, France for an internship followed by six weeks in Oslo, Norway to study Norwegian. I ended up liking Rennes so much I decided to come back to study there — and here I am writing about it two years later!
Before coming to Rennes, I was a computer science student at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. I was also a student in the High Performance Computing Lab at Northeastern, led by Professor Cooperman.
