Staring The Process

Hi! The next few posts were written a few months ago, before I created this blog. I wanted to wait to create my blog until after I learned what country I would be going to so that I could use my country's name in my blog name, but I also wanted to write about my experiences leading up to learning my country assignment. I ended up writing these posts as I went, and just kept them in google drive :). And now there’s a big stack of things to post :).

So how did I start this whole thing? I have always been intrigued with the idea of being an exchange student, so when I saw a poster for the Rotary Youth Exchange Info Night at my school, wanted to go. The meeting was about 2 hours long, and a little bit boring, but it provided a good overview of the program and had some Q&A time at the end. Many Rotary members and current exchange students were also there.

At the meeting, I picked up the Long Term Exchange “Short Form”, which is basically a “I’m raising my hand and I’m kinda interested” form. It’s a one page, super short form which just had some basic questions like “why do you want to go on exchange”, and “what do you do outside of school”. That form was emailed/faxed/given to the outbound coordinator within a week of the info meeting. Yeah! Things moved really fast from the info meeting onward. After the form came the next step...the interview. That really deserves its own post, so I’ll talk about that in the next one.