YES Abroad

          Hi again! I realized that I had actually never put up the post I wrote about YES Abroad, and even though it's kind of late, I decided I still needed to put it up.
          I found out about YES through the AFS website, same as I found out about NSLI-Y. I originally didn't really have a preference for which scholarship I got, and I always would have been completely happy with either of them, but I was extremely happy to get YES because it has more connections with careers I hope to go into when I'm older and for many other reasons. When I first found out about YES, I was incredibly excited by the possibility of getting this scholarship and being able to study in much less common high school study abroad countries, but I also seriously doubted my abilities to receive a scholarship that only 65 students in the entire US received each year. I decided that it was worth a shot, so when the application became available sometime in October (I think), I filled it out and hoped for the best. The application consisted of many of the same things as the NSLI-Y application so there was a lot of biographical information, school grades, teacher recommendations (Thank you to Mr. Olson and Mr. McJimsey!), a parent recommendation (thanks again to my mom!), four essays, some pictures to introduce us to a host family, and a ranking of the countries offered. My top 3 countries were Morocco, Malaysia, and India, followed closely by Oman and Turkey, which is where I am actually getting to go. The rankings are so that they can try to place you in one of your top country choices, but you have no guarantee of getting your top choice. The application deadline ended up getting extended because of all the storms on the East Coast and the Midwest, so I got a few extra days to finish it, and I submitted it in early January. Then I waited and worried for almost 2 months until I recieved an email on February 28 saying that I had been chosen as a semi-finalist. Now, on the YES website, it says that you will hear about semi-finalist status at the end of February and they mean the very, very end of February. I got my email at about 9:30 on the last day of February, so I realized their definition of the end of February very quickly. I had kind of been freaking out all day because I was convinced that I hadn't been chosen because I still hadn't heard from them at 7 when I went to the play at my school. When I got home afterwards, I decided to check my email one more time before I went to bed and my email had finally come. I jumped around my house for awhile and excitedly told the rest of my family once they got home. Many forms were required but I eventually got all the required things in and then I just eagerly awaited the IPSE in DC.
          The In-Person Selection Event was during my spring break, so I was in Florida on vacation with my family at the time. I flew from Florida to DC on Friday, March 21 and returned to Florida on Sunday, March 23. IPSE was an amazing weekend, but I made another post all about it, so you can read about it in more detail in that post.
          I left IPSE with very little confidence because I just felt that everyone had been so much more qualified than I was and that I hadn't done my best in the interviews. But by that point, there was nothing left that I could do, so I just decided that whatever happened would happen and I was going to try to stay calm until Finalist notifications were sent out. That isn't to say that I didn't have my occasional moments of freaking out or of my doubts about getting the scholarship, but I tried my best not to freak out too much.
          During IPSE, everyone had decided that notifications would be sent out on Friday, April 11 because they had always been sent out on that Friday in the years past. I had signed up long ago to go on a school camping trip that weekend leaving early Friday morning so I resigned myself to not knowing until I got home Sunday night. I checked my email one last time before I left my house Friday morning and with no email to be found, I made up my mind to enjoy my weekend and not worry about it. I had an amazing time on the camping trip and finally got to check my email on our way back to Albuquerque. We had stopped at McDonald's for lunch (as is camping trip tradition) and I had asked one of my friends to bring her phone in so that I could check. As I stood in line, I logged in and could barely bring myself to look at the screen because I was so nervous, but I forced myself to and found out that I was an alternate. I was very upset at first, but I decided that I shouldn't completely give up because there was still a chance. And so began even more waiting to see if I could get moved up to Finalist.
          I had no idea how long it would be before I heard from YES again, so I resigned myself to much more waiting. But then April 25 came. We had an assembly for school that day and just before the assembly started, I checked my phone. I was surprised to see that I had a text from my dad saying that an email from YES had come and texts from 2 of my friends from IPSE asking if I had heard from YES. But of course, that was when the assembly began. I admit I didn't pay much attention to what was being said because all I could think about was the email waiting for me. As soon as the assembly ended, I grabbed my friend Megan's phone, opened my email, and saw "YES Abroad Program: Turkey". I couldn't believe it and just walked in a kind of haze of disbelief while I half-laughed and half-cried. I texted my friends and my parents and spent the entire rest of the day smiling and in complete disbelief.
          From that day on, I began to learn as much about Turkey and as much of the language as I could and I have been steadily getting more and more excited. I can't wait until I get to start my incredible adventure. Thank you for reading about this incredible journey that I have been on and I will post about the National PDO which I just got home from soon!

The logo of the YES and YES Abroad program which you find everywhere on every paper you sign and anything else related to YES.

The countries where YES Abroad students can be sent. This is a slightly out of date map because kids aren't sent to Egypt, Mali, or Tunisia right now because of the unrest there.

The Turkish flag

P.S. The 3 girls going to the Philippines for this year begin their travel to their new homes today and I want to wish them safe travels and good luck in their next year abroad.

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." -Martin Buber

          Today, I felt like I should write about why I decided to study abroad. I have so many feelings about this topic I might start rambling, but bear with me on this one.
          I'll start with how I even got the idea of studying abroad in the first place. I first began looking into studying abroad over winter break of my freshman year. I originally hoped to go abroad my sophomore year instead of my junior year to avoid missing ACT's and college stuff, but I'm glad that I am going my junior year instead. During winter break, one of my very close friends told me that she was planning on attending a semester school in Colorado for the first semester of her junior year and I thought that sounded like a pretty cool idea, so I started looking into that too. I also had a close friend at school who was an exchange student from Germany, and listening to her stories about her time in the US and how studying abroad changed her, I knew that at the very least I wanted to travel as much as I could as soon as I could. But as I was looking at semester schools, I found a link to the AFS website. I spent hours that night and the rest of break reading blogs, looking at pictures, and trying to figure out how I could study abroad. By the end of break, I knew for sure that study abroad was what I wanted to do. Figuring out how to tell my parents was the hard part. I finally worked up the courage to ask them on the first day of my sophomore year and I immediately looked into scholarships and gave them as much information as I possibly could. They told me I could apply for the scholarships (although I don't think they thought I would actually get them) and when I received the YES scholarship, it was too good of an offer for them to refuse, which is how I got to this point.
          Now for the reasons to study abroad that I've discovered throughout this process and continue to discover every day. I had an amazing French teacher this year and by the second week of school, I realized that I loved French and languages in general. I realized that I wanted to know as many languages as I possibly could because I wanted to be able to go anywhere in the world and be able to give a person the respect of talking to them in their own language. I also began to realize that up until this point, I've led a very sheltered and privileged life. I go to a private school, have been with the same group of people since I was 12, have never experienced anything drastically different, and I had never been outside of the US. I made the decision that I needed to see the rest of the world and do something that wasn't what I had been doing for 5 years. I needed to have a crazy, new, entirely different experience. And I realized all the amazing things that would come along with seeing the world. I would learn a new language and new traditions. I would try new foods. I would live in a new house. I would get to live someone else's life and have the personal knowledge of life in other places. I admit that I often fall into the trap of assuming that someone who lives in Africa or the Middle East must live such a drastically different life than I do. But I know that they are just the same as us in so many ways. They stress about school, fight with their siblings, hang out with their friends for hours on end. And I wanted to see for myself how people were the same all over the world. One of my other hopes of studying abroad is that I will learn so much more about myself. I want to learn what I am capable of, how strong I am, how much fun I can have even while being incredibly homesick. I knew that living alone in a foreign country where I knew no one when I was only 16 was going to be hard, and that was why I wanted to do it. I wanted to push myself to do something that would challenge every part of me. So that is why I decided to study abroad. I hope that once I am home from Turkey (crazy to think that just over a year from now I will be back) I will be able to reflect on these reasons and add some to why I embarked on this crazy journey. I have a few travel quotes that I love and that really apply to how I feel about my impending departure and journey. In 3 months, I will hopefully be in Turkey and my journey will begin. Thanks for reading!

IPSE!!!!

          Today I decided to finally write the post I've been wanting to write for a long time about the In-Person Selection Event. Also called the IPSE, this is a weekend-long interview process in Washington, DC for the 120 applicants selected as semi-finalists. I got the email from YES on February 28 late at night (proving to me that when they say the end of February, they mean the very end of February). I then had to fill out and submit many forms and complete a survey about my travel arrangements. On Friday, March 21, I flew from Sarasota (where I was on vacation for spring break) to DC and one of my best weekends to date began.
          The IPSE was amazing for so many reasons. It was wonderful to be able to walk up to anyone and have something to talk about with them. Everyone was so inclusive and there was never a second where I felt lonely or bored. Throughout the weekend, we each had two group evaluations, an individual interview, a workshop, country tables, and a French interview if you were hoping to go to a country that spoke French. The country tables were very informative and I appreciated being able to take home information sheets about many of the countries to show my family. The individual interview was intimidating, but the interviewers really wanted to learn about you and were very nice. The group evaluations were actually very fun and I had an awesome group to hang out with. The workshop was interesting and I loved getting to hear the rest of my group's stories. The French interview did not go as well as I was hoping (I seemed to forget that I did know the past tense) and I left that interview feeling less than confident.
          Although I enjoyed the various evaluations, my favorite part of the weekend was the free time. I met so many incredible people who were so similar to me in their desires and interests. It was always so fun to sit in one of the common areas and listen to people's stories about their lives. We also spent a lot of times playing games which was always very fun and very loud. Leaving on Sunday was a sad experience for me. I hated knowing that the next time a group of these kids was together, it would only be just over half of us. That was intimidating to think about and also hard to accept, since all of the people there had always been so nice to me. When I left, I wasn't sure whether I would ever see any of those people again, but I knew that I would stay in touch with them and that I would be excited for anyone who was selected as a finalist because everyone there was so deserving.
          Some of my favorite memories from my weekend in DC include meals, which were great for meeting new people and for sharing many laughs, staying up talking about anything and everything late into the night with my wonderful roommates, an UNO game where the same people always seemed to get skipped over, multiple trips to the ice cream machine at each meal, discovering that you could get to any building in the center through a maze of underground tunnels, and a crazy aggressive game of Spoons with some truly awesome people. The IPSE was truly one of the best weekends of my life and I sometimes wish I could live it all over again. Now that I know I am a finalist, I am beyond excited to see many of the people from the IPSE again and hopefully have another amazing experience. Thanks for reading!

This is not my picture, but these were our handbooks for our weekend. We basically took them everywhere with us because they had our schedules and everything we needed in them. Sadly, this is the only picture I could post because I smartly decided not to take any pictures and this one is taken from the internet.

P.S. I'm hoping that future exchange students applying for YES will read this sometime, so I wanted to talk quickly about clothes for IPSE because I know I was very nervous about this. I wore jeans, a nice shirt, and boots the first and last day since we were traveling and a dress with a cardigan for the other day. There were people in all different kinds of clothing so don't worry too much about it. I would just say that I think dressing somewhat nicely is a good idea, but make sure that your clothes are also somewhat modest because you are trying to make a good impression. Also, just make sure you are comfortable in whatever you wear because you will be wearing it for a very long time.