School
• I believe school is where most of the experience takes place. It is where you make most of your friends and really feel a part of the new country you are in for a year.
Lucilla Brunt, Brazil, PBT Scholar
• It was amazing to see how easy it is to make friends when you are an exchange student. Everyone wants to know you, talk to you and learn from you.
Roesia Miranda, Japan, Mrs Olive Stoddard, 2003
• The best experience I have ever had always involved going to school. I never hated attending this school. School is where I made my everlasting friends, it’s where I learnt how to dress and how to talk like an American, something I have been trying for a while and I must say that my impersonation isn’t bad. School is where I learnt about America and the American people; The American life. It was a great adventure that didn’t kill me like I thought it would, it made me stronger. It made me stronger because I was able to step out of my comfort zone and approach people.
Pania Walters, MET, USA, 2003
• It’s one thing to know about the existence of things like language barriers and cultural misunderstandings, it’s another to see them being broken through and to get past them yourself. The world, with all its mix of peoples and cultures is an amazing place – if only more people had had an opportunity like the one you and AFS gave me. To be able to live and be accepted into another culture is something quite remarkable. Firstly, there’s the language, which can be a critical source of many misunderstandings, but one overcome it’s an amazing feeling to be able to think and dream and communicate in another language.
Karen Wong, Switzerland, MET Scholar
• It not only enables you to meet many wonderful people, live and learn in a different culture, but it gives you so many more invaluable and less easily defined things. It gives you understanding – understanding of different places, different people. It gives you knowledge – knowledge that difference and diversity is something special to be valued and appreciated, not stamped on, although I would hope that many people would understand that anyway. It gives you courage and confidence – to be yourself and believe in yourself. Independence – the independence that enables you to survive no matter where you are or who you are (or aren’t with. And it gives you strength, strength within yourself that enables you to get up if you ever stumble, to keep going and follow your dreams.
My experience in Switzerland showed me that even without my family, my friends, my ingrained way of life, my ‘normal’ surroundings… all the things that ‘made’ my life, I could survive. I did it.
Karen Wong, Switzerland, MET Scholar
