TL,DR: I couldnu2019t believe it. It took me 30 minutes to realize it was real. I even verified if the email iu2019ve recieved was not a scam. In fact I didnu2019t even remember I applied!Flashback: I applied in October 2023. after a six-week trip in Southern California. I was back in Paris and I was suffocating. I missed the space, the nature, the friendly and warm SoCal, the weather, etc.So I applied in late 2023 after I took my first full time employee job. It was easy, I just needed to fill out a form, send a couple of pictures taken by a professional photographer (I remember the ugly beige and purple striped sweater I was wearing too! A pure fashion piece now archived into the immigration administration database.) and uploaded all to the dedicated website. Note that the department of state only opens that website during the time of application, during about a month.Fast forward: I checked my applicant status in May 2023. with zero hope I could have won. And I didn't find my name in the annual bulletin.Life had moved on, I started to date my soon to be husband, I changed job - which was horrible - but once in a while me and my husband we were taking about our dream jobs and life. He was telling me that he always wanted to covered NBA basketball (we literally live 20 min from the Oracle stadium and heu2019s still too shy to apply) and I was telling him that I always wanted to cover tech industry in the San Francisco Bay Area (Iu2019m not lying).But then, on Friday, July the 13th (Iu2019m not joking), I received an email from the department of state let me know that I should check again my status, forwarding me my application number, which I did, and I was pre-selected!Again, I couldn't believe it, so I stalk all the Internet to make sure that the email was a scam. But since the domain name associated to the email was u201cstate.govu201d, my doubts were dismissed and I started to compulsively repeate u201cNo!u201d.Now I can tell you when I called my husband and my mom how their first reactions were. But thatu2019s another story.