Olivier Bahizi, an LSA transfer student and film, media, and television alum (A.B. ’21), drinks a lot of coffee. He’s a busy man.
Bahizi works in LSA’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), where he advises students about conducting academic research and the process of transferring from community colleges. He’s also a graduate student, a translator of French, Kinyarwanda, and Swahili at the Washtenaw County Health Department, a researcher in FTVM, and a parent to a three and a half year old. Somehow, Bahizi finds the spare time to write screenplays and to take on jobs as a literary translator, bringing poetry and novels from French and English into his mother tongue, Kinyarwanda.
“My journey now is deeply linked to my past,” Bahizi shares, as his third latte of the morning arrives at a table outside an Ann Arbor coffee shop.
From Rwanda to Ann Arbor
The journey that led him to U-M began when he was born in Rwanda in 1977. Bahizi survived the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, when he was 16, a harrowing experience that inspired his first novel. He completed the book two years later, at age 18, the same year he graduated high school. The book, titled Humura, means Breathe in English, and was published in 2017 to strong reviews.
He was hired as a journalist at a government newspaper and traveled the country for the next six years, writing all kinds of stories, and making his name in a weekly satire column. “I figured I should keep writing,” Bahizi says with a shrug. A collection of his columns were compiled and published in 2004 as Mapengu, which translates to Toothless.
The memory of Sunday visits to a cinema inside of an old church in his village near Kigali, the capital, as a child remained with Bahizi—he wanted to learn how to create stories for the screen. Bahizi’s desire to work in film and fluency in French led him to Brussels in 2004, where he learned the basics of operating a camera, film editing, and shooting. A decade later, Bahizi joined his then-fiance (now his wife) who was living in the United States, and the couple settled in Ann Arbor.
“When we visited the university I walked into the Reading Room at the law school and fell in love!” he says. “This is where I wanted to study!” To be clear, Bahizi didn’t want to pursue a law degree. Walking into U-M’s cinematically beautiful reading room had reinvigorated his enduring desire to study film.
“But my English was so bad at the time,” Bahizi says. And he worried that his age and life experiences would distance him from his cohort. He enrolled at Washtenaw Community College (WCC) in 2016 hoping to improve his English, with the possibility of transferring to LSA’s FTVM program at the back of his mind.
The Library of Memory
Later that year, he saw a UROP flyer for the Community College Summer Fellowship Program at U-M in a WCC hallway. He applied for the program and was paired with Professor Solomon, who needed a French speaker for a project on early film auteur Georges Méliès. It was a perfect match: Bahizi finally got to work in film at LSA, and with his work and life experiences and fluency in French, Bahizi was exactly who Solomon was looking for.
As for his worries about being too old to be part of an undergraduate program at LSA, Bahizi is grateful for a conversation he had with UROP director Michelle Ferrez.
“She told me that my age and my background would help to shape the research and bring new points of view, that I would be coming in with perspectives that would advance the work,” Bahizi says. “All of the things I had thought of as barriers were actually strengths.”
His summer of research with Solomon was a success, and at the end of it, both Ferrez and Solomon encouraged Bahizi to transfer to LSA, which he did in 2019.
Bahizi says that after graduating from FTVM in 2021, he was not ready to leave his studies at LSA, or as he calls it, “the library of the mind.” He found a way to stay inside that library after graduation, first by literally working at the FTVM library, and then by pursuing a Masters of Science degree in the School of Information in archives and digital curation. As a genocide survivor, writer, and translator, he says that library and information studies were a part of what it means to him to be a “memory keeper.”
His research partnership with Solomon continues today. And now, in his role at UROP—the place that opened the door to his own studies at LSA—Bahizi guides transfer students into the beautiful library of the mind.
The Journey of a Transfer Student
Now, as the Changing Gears graduate coordinator at UROP, Bahizi helps to facilitate the Community College Summer Fellowship Program and the Changing Gears program, both of which offer research opportunities to transfer students currently enrolled in community colleges and he supports students in their research and transfer advice needs. He also is a full-time graduate student at the U-M School of Information, and a researcher on Professor Solomon’s Audiovisual Lexicon project.
Bahizi’s advice for transfer students draws deeply on his own journey.
“I start by telling them my story. I came back to college when I was 40. If there was any fear I had before, it was about my age and the language barrier, and what I thought of as my socioeconomic and cultural differences. At one point I mistakenly believed that those things were barriers,” he says. “Now, I tell them that every aspect of your life can be used to educate yourself.”
Early on in FTVM, a student in one of Bahizi’s classes stared at him, asked his age, and said, “You are older than my dad!” Bahizi laughed, but this student had pressed on one of his initial fears before transferring to LSA. And what his classmate had blurted out was true. Bahizi was over two decades older than most of his cohort, and he had worked and lived all over the world. But Ferrez and Solomon had been right about these differences being strengths, and Bahizi found that his rich variety of life experiences only deepened his learning in LSA. “The real hard work is in how you perceive yourself, he says. “That’s internal work.”
His broad areas of interest and experience also come in handy for Bahizi when he advises students on their research projects. He tells them to follow their curiosity, and to go big. “Sometimes students get stuck when they are too narrow in their research—I tell them and myself to be open to a wide variety of research areas and perspectives.
“We often tell students to focus, but instead, I say to expand—synthesize different areas of expertise and experience, different cultures, perspectives, and languages. These give you the curiosity to expand the breadth of research and discovery. We have to hold a lot of things in our heads. I share my background to convey this.”
Bahizi’s words resonate with the students he works with at UROP, because, he says, they come from all over the world, from all different backgrounds and life experiences, and are of different ages. “Everyone needs a bridge,” Bahizi says, finishing his coffee. “I consider myself a bridge.”
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