Being an exchange student is no easy feat; it takes courage to move to a new place that has a different language, culture, and environment. A person who wants to take the opportunity must embrace being flexible, selfless, adventurous, and willing to learn anything. That is why, during the 2022-23 school year, Paulina Viteka is in her first year of being an exchange student at Cascade High School. The day she took the first step of her journey in Washington State was August 13th where she will be staying until around the end of June 2023 or the beginning of August 2023. She will continue her high school education back at home in Austria and graduate in 2025 after which she hopes to move to Italy to pursue her career in creating fashion.
The Rotary in Austria has done so much to make her dream of being an exchange student become a reality. Potential exchange students must contact an exchange program and go through a selected process to be eligible. A specific program that is popular is the Rotary Youth Exchange in Leavenworth. They have helped students from more than over 100 countries, including students who might have been the first exchange student from their native country. This program strives to provide lifetime experiences to help students learn beyond themselves and learn lessons that can carry with them throughout their lives.
Gary Schuster, the former Rotary Exchange chairman for the district covering Washington state and half of British Columbia, described the process for the exchange program: “A contact with a local participating Rotary Club is made. The application and training process takes almost a year. The process starts in September, the year before the student departs in August the next year.”
As compared to other exchange programs, Rotary is widely considered to be a wise choice, financially speaking, for students and families looking to live and study abroad. Rotary's costs are roughly a third of most other programs charge and covers expenses the others do not. Some common mistakes that Schuster has seen over the years with exchange students were not trying to learn the language, not being flexible enough to handle unsettling events, being too critical of the culture, succumbing to severe homesickness as a result of excess contact with friends and family they left behind, and violating the four D’s: (no drinking, driving, dating [romantic relations], or drugging). Violations of the latter four are grounds for termination from the exchange program.
A fun fact about the Rotary Program is that it’s uniquely reciprocal in nature, fostering exchange partners at the district level, with one-on-one exchanges. Each district has around 60 clubs and when a district agrees to accept an inbound student, the district can place that student with any one of those 60 clubs. Students, either inbound or outbound must be between the ages of 15-18 years old at the time of departure from their home country.
On average the cost for the exchange student from the Rotary is $7,000, including:
School Tuition
Room and Board
Arranging Airfare and Associated Costs
Insurance
Passport Arrangement and Expenses
Weekend Orientations for Students and Parents, Before, During, and Returning
Monthly Stipend
Excursions
Schuster explained, “The mission of Rotary is to provide service to others, promote integrity, and advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace both locally and internationally. [It] focus[es] on humanitarian efforts relating to health, poverty, water, education, and other needs through [its] worldwide fellowship of business, professional, and community leaders.”
Viteka, a fifteen-year-old Kodiak sophomore, has always had thoughts of becoming an exchange student. She has been aware of the possibility of being an exchange student for a long time. However, what drove her to it was her cousin becoming one in Idaho. Being in the United States, Paulina wanted to experience the culture, learn English, and meet new people. Along with learning English, she speaks her native tongues, German and Spanish, which she learned in school.
Her current host family is the Foleys, comprised of Kelsey Foley (host mom), Steve Foley (host dad), and Ridley Foley (host brother). She also has a host sister, Cascade High School junior Kestral Foley. The first time she met her host family Paulina was severely jet lagged from the long airplane ride. The first meal they had together in America was at a bakery in Seattle where she had a chocolate croissant. Paulina appreciates the time she has with her host family, especially when they come together to the table when they eat dinner together each night. “When I first came here everything was a little confusing with all the differences between the countries and the different ways they acted and talked to each other. Now that I have been here for two months, I feel much more comfortable with the environment and talking to people,” she said when asked how she felt in the beginning compared to now.
In Austria, Paulina had a similar program called Rotating and she had known this through a recommendation from her Spanish teacher. There were many different exchange clubs in her city. She contacted the closest one near her and had to wait for a few months to hear back from them. After Rotary had told her about the next steps, she had to go through various doctors with checkups, vaccinations, and many documents to be filled out. Next her parents helped her to go through the whole documentation from personality to general life, she also had to speak to many Rotary members as well. After Vitaki was accepted, and shortly before she left for the US, she and all the other new exchange students from her district spent a weekend together receiving information for their year ahead. After everything was organized, she and her parents had to go to the American Embassy to get her visa approved and buy the plane tickets. The whole ordeal took around 5-7 months.
Not everything is magical, it’s not rare when exchange students get homesick or depressed being away from their loved ones. Paulina communicates and talks with her family every three weeks on zoom. They talk about how they are doing and what’s happening from where they are. The few things she misses most about her hometown are the restaurants and her friends. One cultural difference between Austria and the U.S. is the relaxed systems and non-strict teachers here in the U.S. She commented: “People, and especially teachers, are much nicer here. We have nice teachers at home too, of course, but we also have a lot of very strict and sometimes even mean teachers. People in stores ask you about your day and sometimes even start a short conversation. In Austria people who don’t know each other don’t really want to talk to each other if they don’t have to.”
The littlest things that seem normal because of personal experience, culture, and how society acts can mean a huge difference to others who are not familiar with the customs. One of the few things that she does to cope when she feels down is reading a good book or watching an interesting movie/show. Sometimes it can be the other way around, as Schuster stated: “After a year with on exchange, our students are sometime reluctant to leave their host countries. That can cause something called reverse cultural shock. Recognizing this, Rotary gathers these ‘rebounds’ and their families for a weekend to address this phenomenon, together with our district psychologist and former exchange students, to work through the issue.”
A few pros from Paulina’s perspective about being an exchange student are getting to meet new people, experiencing different cultures from her own, improving her language skills, learning how to be independent, and, in general, making lifetime memories that will last in her future. Some cons that she learned when moving are being with and living with new people can be scary sometimes at first, missing friends and family, being a little lonely in the beginning, not knowing everything when going back home and school, and having to work harder to catch up. Knowing that she might miss some experiences with her friends during the time she’s in America is also challenging for Paulina. One life lesson she has learned was to be less scared of doing something wrong while speaking the language that she’s learning.
Every student’s journey to being an exchange student is unique and a teachable moment for life. An advice that Paulina gives to all the students who want to be an exchange student is, “If you have the possibility to do an exchange year, DO IT! You will have lifetime experiences that no one else in your friend group will be able to experience. You will meet a lot of new and interesting people, improve your language skills and just generally have a great time. And even though you will miss your friends sometimes, in the end it will be worth it.”
Comments