My Highschool Year in the USA

Choice, commitment, and consequences- looking back at the experiences I made during my high school year in the USA  07/08 I have come to the conclusion that all of them can be led back to those three steps. My name is Franziska Meier and I’m currently a student at the Gymnasium Erding 2. This text is supposed to inform all students who are planning on having an adventurous  experiences while studying abroad and all parents who haven’t decided yet on whether to let their little “baby” go or not.

Choice- From my experiences as a teenager I certainly do know that most of us actually do need our parent’s advice and their help with choosing. Planning to go to a different country requires one to collect a lot of information, for example all the different organizations that offer to guide you through such a high school year. I chose “Camps International” because I felt like the people there cared about my individual questions, problems, etc... In my opinion what’s even more important than choosing the right organization is that you try to find out who you are and that you find out more about your character, your personality, your interests, and you should care to find out whether you’re brave enough to survive in a foreign country.

Commitment- Once you have made the decision to leave home you have to stick with it and actually get on the plane which takes you to wherever you have chosen to go. In my case that was Crystal Lake, Illinois in the USA. I am not going to lie, the first three months were tough. I always thought I could speak English very well until I met Americans and they started to speak English in their accent. Oh boy! Another issue was that I didn’t have any friends and despite the fact that my host family was totally great they hadn’t known me at that point in time and I was pretty lonely for the first weeks. But then the school year at Prairie Ridge High School started and I found something to keep me busy. The teachers and fellow students were all really nice to me and showed me at all times that I was welcome. I’m glad that I made the decision right at the beginning of my high school year to participate in extracurricular activities. I was a member of the girl’s track team (=Leichtathletik) at my high school and had practice every day after school. School in the USA is different from school in Germany. In America it is the case that as you participate in extracurricular activities school becomes more and more a part of your life partly because you get home from school pretty late at night but also because you have almost all of your friends at school. The family you live with plays a big role in your development as an exchange student as well. Whatever your host family plans on doing or talks about at the dinner table- you’ll be part of it. I loved staying with a host family because when I was living with them they treated me as a member of their family and now almost two years after I came back to Germany we still are friends and it still feels like they’re my “American family”.

Consequences-When you get back from your High School Year life is different than before you left to study abroad. It takes some time until you get back into life as you used to know it. Two years after having made the best experiences of my life I realize that studying abroad no matter in what country is significantly important to become more open minded in a society that becomes more and more global.