My Exchange Year in the United States

Imagine this, you’re going on exchange for a year? Awesome, right. Leave all the ordinary and boring stuff behind and begin an adventure of your lifetime. During that year you will have so much fun, on the opposite side of the world from home, your parents are not there to tell you what to do and what not to do. You will travel and see so many places you have never even heard of before. You will get new friends from all over the world, try new food, and do stuff that you have never even thought of before. You will go to parties and feel like at that moment that you are so incredibly happy and thankful for all of this.

Sounds good, right? But here’s what exchange students don’t tell you...

Everything seems so boring before you left but now that you start to wonder that flying away is going to be a big mistake. Saying goodbye to your family, friends, and relationships, it’s hard. You want to know who will and who will not be there when you come back. Who knows your parents are not going to be there and they probably won’t even when they want to. The fear you have that people will change when you come home, you feel left out of your friend's group. Changes just freak you out. But don’t need to worry about it, because it will still happen at some point in life, with or without you deciding to go on abroad. Meeting new people is amazing. Making friends could be difficult. You will meet many people, but only the real ones that want to stay. And when you finally found your place, you realize that it wouldn’t last forever.

When you first arrived, everything was so interesting. But after a few months, everything will turn into a routine, just like back home. You will wake up, go to school, eat, sleep, and repeat. People won’t be interested anymore in you after a while because you’re not “the new one” anymore. But still, you will have a great year. Until the most difficult day, you will ever face comes. The day you return home. All you can think about is you are in a new home and you don’t want to leave. You have built a whole new life in a year and now you’re supposed to just leave it behind and who knows if you will ever return. Leaving the people you loved is the worst part because even though you know you can come back and see them again, there is a dot in your head; what if I can’t? You start missing the smallest things like the grocery store and even the most boring history class seems better than leaving it all behind. You build a life for several years and leave it for 10 months. You build a life for 10 months and leave it forever. Which one is harder?

For me, going on exchange to The United States is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The most exciting yet the most challenging year of my life. My year has been an emotional loopy roller coaster. With the ups and downs, the twists, the turns that will make you get queasy at some points, but yet you still don’t want it to end. It’s been the hardest and also the best year of my life. It feels like you are jumping out of the edge of your comfort zone to the darkness of the unknown, however some fantastic people will catch you.

Living away from home in a completely strange land, not knowing anybody and the language has taught me a lot of things. My perspective has grown and changed in a positive way that I could never have imagined. I become more independent, and confident about myself and to speak my voice. I appreciate my family and friends more, neither back home or family that open their door and heart for me and friends that accept me here. Within this adventure, it proves to me that I can do anything by myself and nothing is impossible. I will always be grateful and proud of myself that I have the courage to go out of my comfort zone and discover what the world has in store for me. My exchange year is a life changing experience to me and will be something I will always cherish.

In my exchange year, I had an amazing opportunity to study in Energy Institute High School, the first high school in the US that prepared students for careers in the fields of geoscience, alternative energy, and offshore technology. My journey in Houston, as the energy capital of the world, inspired me to take engineering as my major and concentration in Energy Technologies and Sustainability. The presentation of the minority numbers of female students at Energy Institute High School challenged me to choose to become a future engineer and focus on the STEM field. I believe that sustainability requires multiple perspectives and at the same time requires collaboration as a way to make it happen, and because of that I choose Boston University as a place for me to study, except the fact that Boston is the country’s largest college town. Boston University encourages engineering students to strengthen their communication skills and global awareness through the program that they provide in the college of engineering such as the program in the Engineering Product Innovation Center. The College of Engineering of Boston University facilitates the students to be a part of the discovery process by participating in research projects in faculty labs and presented at national engineering conferences. Boston University also provides a facility for engineering students to study abroad in France, Germany, and Spain which is also one of my goals in the future to go abroad again.