Hi! My name is Kai, and I am a foreign exchange student. I am from the state of Kansas, USA, doing a student exchange through the Rotary Youth Exchange Program to Belgium for the 2025-2026 school year. This blog is a documentation of my experience before, during, and after my trip. Enjoy!
The Beginning + Application Process
I just now realized I haven’t talked about the application process at all!
By the time I leave in mid-August, it will have almost been a year since I applied to be in the program, and longer since I first reached out to Rotary about it.
I’ve wanted to do a foreign exchange program for years, though I’d never really made a solid effort to figure out how to do it until May of 2024. It’s always been this distant idea that I never thought I’d actually get to do, whether that was because I doubted my own abilities to succeed in a program that seemed designed for people so different from me, or because I just didn’t think I could.
I remember the first time I seriously thought about it was at a Royals baseball game. This was before I knew how baseball worked and I was bored out of my mind, so I was spacing out when the thought came up. I looked up a website that listed a bunch of different programs. I remember wanting to show my mom, or ask about it, but I was so anxious. I didn’t have as much of a handle on my anxiety back then, so the question was just stuck in my throat for a while until I blurted it out. She thought it was a cool idea, but we didn’t talk about it after that.
I asked my French teacher about it a few times, but never did anything with the information he gave me. The one time I finally did act on it was around May 2024. We’d already done enrollment and picked classes for the next year by then, and we were doing a final round of meetings with our academic counselors to talk about career ideas, any class changes, etc. I mentioned that I was interested in doing a foreign exchange because I was considering teaching abroad, and it was an experience I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I hadn’t expected anything to come of it, I considered it a pipe dream by then, so when she gave me the contact info for the Rotary district’s outbound coordinator, I wasn’t expecting to do anything with it.
But I did send him an email because I was curious and wanted to see what that process would look like. I learned it was still possible for me to do an exchange, and after talking to my parents about it, I took it more seriously. I went back to my academic counselor and we reworked my class schedule for the next school year, I enrolled in online summer classes to catch up on the credits I would need and we set the ball rolling for me to graduate from high school a full year early.
A lot of the process involves waiting for something to happen or for an event. It was very painful. I was looking toward my future but I still had stuff to do in the moment to make it happen. This was the first time I’d had a real long-term goal. Before then, I didn’t really know what I was going to do with myself. I still don’t, to some extent. It felt so exciting to have something so big to look forward to, yet everything was moving so slow and I still had to sit through boring eschool lectures about handling money and English grammar that I’d already learned at least two times before (though, I like to learn, so it’s hard for me to be truly bored when I’m learning. I really did like the romanticism unit in ELA).
When late August finally rolled around, I was able to start the first application. It was pretty long, and there were a lot of things to do. Lots of personal information. I had to write a letter to my future host families, and my parents can tell you how much I struggled with it. It’s hard to talk about myself like that. I had to answer a specific set of questions and I ended up color coding the draft to make sure everything was answered lol.
After sending in that application, I had to do a small interview with some representatives from the club that would sponsor me if I got in. It was a lot easier than I expected. They asked me questions about myself, why I wanted to go, where I wanted to go, and they ended up pulling my mom over from where she was sitting nearby to ask her some questions as well. Overall it was very easy-going.
I passed this part of the application, and the next part of the process wasn’t until December, so there was a lot of more waiting. It felt so strange to do something as normal as school while all this was going on in the background. I went to some of the meeting of my Rotary club and volunteered for some of their events. I took a communications (speech) class in school to work on social anxiety, auditioned for ECKMEA (district choir), and went about my days as normal.
But through all this, there was also the simmering anxiety of if I didn’t get in. At this point, I was set to graduate early whether I got in or not. I hadn’t thought about college, I barely knew what I was going to do with my life, and the next year of my life was riding on this because I didn’t really have a plan B. I made myself feel better by saying I could maybe move my last PE credit to next school year and get an extra semester, but whether I would have been able to do that or not was unclear. I wouldn’t be able to take some of the classes I had planned to take before I changed it all in May, and I was so scared of being done with school but having no clue what to do next.
So you can understand my nerves when December rolled around. This interview was much more in depth and much more intimidating than the first one. There were several rooms that the applicant switched through, each having three people from different clubs in the district who asked you different questions. Some of the questions were the same, and I talked a lot about my anxiety and how I was working on it and how I wanted to go to France, Belgium, or Sweden (I forgot that Switzerland also spoke French, I picked Sweden as my third because of how green they are there). One of the rooms had former exchange students, and one of the rooms had a licensed psychologist who asked more in depth about my anxiety and being transgender. I also got a pop quiz in French which I was wholly unprepared for and I ended up using the wrong tense because we were focusing on past tense in my French class at the time and I went into autopilot.
So all in all a good time.
There was one more room where they asked my parents about me, and from what they told me it went well.
I was told to expect a call later that night. I went to a friends house to celebrate being done with interviews and bake some cookies.
I ended up missing the call despite have my ringer on and my volume up. Still not sure how that happened. I called her back and left a voicemail and about thirty minutes later I got the call that solidified the next year of my life: I got in!
After that, it was more waiting. There wasn’t a whole lot to do other than finish high school and wait as they did their own thing in the background. It was a little frustrating how little information I had on the process after I got in, but there isn’t really anything I could have done with it anyway. We had a meeting in February where we talked more about next steps and where everyone was at, and we got some more information for things for us to do in the meantime. We had another meeting in April, where we presented a small slideshow in the language of where we were going and heard from a current exchange student, as well as our parents got to hear from a parent of a former exchange student. Our last meeting was in June, where we talked more about the next steps and heard from two more former exchange students.
I also learned that the girl going to Spain had had to do her fingerprints three separate times and still had to go in for a fourth time for her visa. To be fair, they did give us a paper describing what different country’s visa process’ looked like during interviews and Spain’s just said “you will cry.” Sounds pretty accurate from what I can tell.
Currently, I am waiting to hear back from the consulate on my visa so we can set up flights and I can figure out a more solid date for my departure. I’ve been able to speak to my first host family and hearing from them is so cool. It’s one thing when you’re waiting and waiting and it’s another thing entirely when you get to actually participate. It feels so real yet at the same time so fake. I’m trying not to think to hard about it and focus on the now so I can manage my anxiety about the whole thing. I have the inkling I’ll be doing that a lot this next year, but I’m not complaining in the slightest.
I am so excited, I’m going to learn and experience so much. It’s going to be so incredibly overwhelming and still so fun. I’m excited to see what kind of person I am after, because I doubt I’ll be completely the same. I’m excited to meet new people, make new memories, learn another language, and so much more. It’s a new chapter for me, one I’ve been thinking about for years, and it’s so exciting to see it finally come true.
