With an ocean separating her from home, Junior Vicky Huebner, from Germany, is adjusting to a new country, a new school, and a second language. She had the opportunity to come and live in America for a year through the AFS-USA Study Abroad program. She heard about this program in her home-town, thought it was cool, and decided to just try it out. So she filled out an application to come to the U.S. and waited to hear who her host family would be.

Back in VH, her home-stay student, sophomore Lily Walters, decide to host an exchange student for a year after her mom Mom said it was something she should do. Being an only child, Lily says she didn’t really want a host student until Vicky actually got here. Never getting to meet in advance, Lily and her family received a list of three names and bios which included a note to your “potential host family”. Lily says that she remembers reading about Vicky’s hobbies, what she was interested in, but mostly remembers that it had pretty bad English grammar.

Living here for 8 months out of her allotted 12 so far, Vicky says the best thing about her experience at VH so far is the school sports. At her home in Germany, they do not have any school sports. She loves that she can get the “typical movie” high school sports experience here. On the other hand, her least favorite thing is that we have the same classes every day. Back home, they run on a block schedule where they take different classes every week rather than each subject taught each day. The most academically challenging portion of her immersion experience in the U.S was American Lit. In fact, she only ended up taking for her first two weeks in America. At that time, she says her English wasn’t great so it made it a lot harder to follow what was happening in class. But Lily says that not, on a scale of 1-10, Vicky’s English has gotten 8 times better.

Unfortunately for Vicky, this study abroad is purely for personal and cultural experience. With the way our classes run and how they do not match up with the curriculum in Germany, all the classes she takes this school year at VH will not transfer over as credit back home. Because of this, she will be a year behind back home and have to make up all her classes over the summer and next school year. She says, however, that it is definitely worth it. Experiencing all the different places you can go, from New York to California, and seeing all the things you can learn here makes her wish she lived here permanently.

She left saying this to anyone who is thinking about studying abroad, “you need to do it, it’s a really good experience that you won’t regret it at all.”

So, if you see Lily and Vicky walking through the hallways, give them a wave or stop and say hi, we’re lucky to have people from around the globe at our school!