When Alexandre Lacaze was growing up in Saint-Mandé, France, he never imagined himself living or going to school anywhere else. It was his mother who suggested he expand his possibilities by looking at colleges outside of France.

Being an active and competitive fencer all his life, beginning as soon as he was old enough to hold the sabre and progressing all the way to competing on the French junior national fencing team, Lacaze decided he would look at colleges across the United States that had a reputation for hosting stellar fencing programs.

Notre Dame was at the top of the list.

However, getting through the language requirement during the application process was a struggle for Lacaze, as his English was not as advanced in high school as it is today. Despite that initial hurdle, Lacaze was accepted—much to his surprise.

“I didn’t start looking at colleges until late in my senior year of high school,” Lacaze said, “and I never even thought about applying to US schools for fencing. So when my mom suggested I consider Notre Dame, I didn’t really believe her that it could be possible. I’m so grateful that it worked out.”

A global education

Another surprise for Lacaze was how perfect his timing was going to be. When he entered Notre Dame as a first-year student, the Keough School of Global Affairs was accepting its first cohort of global affairs majors. Previously, students could declare global affairs as a supplementary major only, rather than a primary major. Lacaze will be part of the major’s first graduating class.

“There is such an advantage to having a degree in global affairs in this current environment,” said Lacaze, who is a double major in global affairs and economics with a minor in sustainability. “As countries around the world are becoming more and more isolated from one another, understanding different cultures and sharing international knowledge has become all the more important and valuable as we seek a more global perspective on things.”

Fortunately for Lacaze—who, as an international student, came to Notre Dame with a different perspective than most students—he was able to immerse himself in research and projects that further exposed him to international development concerns around the world.

For his senior global affairs policy capstone seminar with Steve Reifenberg, teaching professor of international development for the Keough School, Lacaze and his team worked with Global Affairs Canada (a Canadian governmental entity much like the US Department of State) to provide context for how climate change affects security in coastal West Africa. The project required Lacaze to identify linkages between climate change and violent conflict in the region, pushing him to learn how to navigate the complexities of environmental change and sociopolitical instability, in addition to developing well-researched policy recommendations.

Finding a community

The project also allowed Lacaze to lean into his native French language skills to translate interviews for his team as part of the policy formation process. This was not something Lacaze could have ever anticipated, as he spent his first year at Notre Dame trying to master English so he could survive his classes.

“In the beginning, it was really difficult because I wasn’t super comfortable speaking English and it was very hard to understand people,” Lacaze said.

He credited his new friends, residence hall mates, classmates, and many others within the Notre Dame community, who offered their assistance and encouraged him as he learned more language skills each day.

He is also grateful for the tight-knit support he received from his fellow fencing team members. Their mutual strength propelled Lacaze to finish seventh as a junior in the individual sabre competition at the 2024 NCAA fencing championships and to become captain of the varsity team as a senior. At the 2025 NCAA fencing championships in March, the team took home first-place honors. This was the team’s 14th win and Lacaze’s third in his four years at Notre Dame.

One particular fencing teammate consoled Lacaze when an ankle injury sidelined him from competing in the NCAA regionals in his first year. “I was so scared and hurt, and he gave me a really important life lesson,” Lacaze said. “That is, ‘everything happens for a reason,’ and I just locked in on that and kept working, and it has stayed with me ever since.”

‘A great opportunity’

Through a course Reifenberg taught on international development in practice, Lacaze worked for the US State Department on a project where he and five other students examined economic interests for US businesses in coastal West Africa. Their aim was to reframe the Global Fragility Act with a focus on economic opportunities.

Lacaze also had the opportunity this past semester to conduct research in consultation with Erin Graham, associate professor of global affairs at the Keough School, with the goal of creating a policy brief on climate finance for the Green Climate Fund.

“We are looking at how climate finance has evolved over the past few years and are collecting data to give recommendations for this next replenishment period of the Green Climate Fund,” Lacaze said.

These three academic experiences reinforced Lacaze’s interest in international development solutions, particularly those that integrate sustainability and governance. They also cemented Lacaze’s passion to focus on Africa in his future endeavors.

For his sustainability minor capstone project, Lacaze has embraced the values shared in Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ by heeding “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” He worked with another Notre Dame student-athlete to implement carbon offset policies on air travel for the athletic teams by coordinating a project to help winterize low-income homes in the South Bend area to assist homeowners in saving money on their energy consumption.

“I believe the ‘cry of the earth’ is related to the ‘cry of the poor,’” Lacaze said. “And I think Notre Dame has such a great opportunity to show what it can do in terms of research and campus-wide initiatives regarding sustainability.”

Coincidentally, during Lacaze’s senior year and while he was working on this particular project, Notre Dame launched the Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative in response to the ever-threatening effects of sustainability challenges on food, water, energy, and infrastructure, as well as the health and dignity of humanity.

In reflecting on his time at Notre Dame, Lacaze said he wasn’t sure in the beginning how he would build his own personal relationship with faith and what that might look like for him and his future. The projects he participated in and worked on, his connections with people across campus who come from different perspectives, and the life lessons he obtained through his experiences have answered that question for him.

“Being here made me realize that what’s really important to me, what really matters, is having a positive impact on the world,” Lacaze said. “Being concerned about our climate situation and figuring out how to make the world safe for people to live in—that’s how I want to live out my faith. I want to interact with people in a way that shows them love and empathy.”

Lacaze plans to attend graduate school to study international affairs. But he is certainly “staying open to any and all possibilities” because he knows, in the end, everything happens for a reason.