25 September 2025. The first day we, second-year interpretation students at ETIB, stepped into a booth in a room where a real conference was taking place. It was a conference on Land Health, one we had been preparing for over the previous ten days. We arrived early, as interpreters always should. We set up our materials, tested the equipment, and listened carefully to the advice our instructors offered.

Then, from behind the booth’s glass window, we watched the attendants file in. Men in suits and ties, women in blazers and dresses, all greeting one another. The murmur in the hall grew louder and louder, and with it our heartbeats—our nervousness, but also our excitement.

The conference was meant to be nothing more than an exercise for us: a dummy booth with no listeners other than our boothmate and our instructor, and no judgment other than that of ourselves, striving desperately to live up to the expectations we had built in our minds. Yet it became far more than an extracurricular exercise.

That window through which we observed the hall was a window into our future. The excitement we felt before the conference began was the racing of our hearts in anticipation of the journey ahead. And the eagerness we carried with us as we left that day was the moment when our ethereal dreams began to solidify into tangible reality. 

Sara Ayache

M3 Interpretation