“This is it,” I thought, stepping through the sliding doors into a dry heat like a warm embrace. “This is where I need to be.”

It sounds dramatic, but I’ve never felt such instant, all-consuming certainty as the first time I set foot in Los Angeles at age 15. Even from LAX airport, with its bustle of hire cars, rolling suitcases and concrete buildings, I could tell that I’d stumbled on somewhere special. After a disappointing trip to New York City several years earlier, I had kept my expectations safely low, but LA, with its smiling passersby, its extravagant lifestyle and its palm trees — my God, the palm trees — irrevocably blew me away.

My dad and I spent two weeks exploring the City of Angels and other parts of Southern California. We walked for 6 hours in West Hollywood, most likely the first people to ever do that (this is not a city built for walking). We watched double features at the New Beverly cinema, an independent venue owned by Quentin Tarantino that remains my favourite place on the planet to this day. We reconnected with some distant cousins whom I’d never met, who introduced us to the profoundly American wonders of Venice Boardwalk, Universal Studios and the Cheesecake Factory.

We took a road trip across the desert to Palm Springs, with a stop at the painted magic of Salvation Mountain when creator Leonard Knight was still alive to show us around. We carried on to a truly surreal motel experience in Calexico, where it was just us, a gas station and, if I remember correctly, a Jack in the Box fast food outpost. After a night in San Diego, we returned to LA and ended up in a hotel in Westwood, home of the University of California, Los Angeles. LA has few tourist attractions, so my dad and I decided to take a self-guided tour of the campus, where my fate was sealed.

When I returned home to Paris, armed with a UCLA t-shirt and diary, I spent hours surfing the university website, or with my nose in an SAT test prep book, or brainstorming topics for my application essay. I consulted with all my teachers, some of whom were less than encouraging. But there was never any doubt for me: whether through hard work, sheer luck or a combination of the two, I knew where I had to be.

Two years later, I unpacked into a three-person dorm room at UCLA. I was constantly asked whether it was hard living so far away from home, a question that made me smile. Sure, I missed my family, but with the fearlessness that’s part and parcel of being 17, moving by myself to a different continent had been the easiest decision I’d ever made. There were palm trees outside my door — need I say more?