An Introduction

Hi, I'm Anika. I'm a 16-year-old from a small town in western Minnesota, and for 10 months, I'll be participating in a high school study abroad program in Antalya, Turkey through AFS.

For those of you who don't know what AFS is, here's a brief explanation: AFS stands for the American Field Service, and today it's called AFS Intercultural Programs. Originally, it was called the American Ambulance Field Service. In 1914, Americans living in Paris at the outbreak of World War 1 volunteered as ambulance drivers to an American hospital just outside of Paris. Nowadays, AFS Intercultural Programs is geared towards building international relationships to help progress towards more understanding and world peace.

Foreign exchange is something I've been interested in doing for as long as I can remember, but I kind of put the idea on the back burner until my sophomore year (2012-2013), when I learned that one of my friends was going abroad for the 2013-2014 school year. In August of 2013, I looked into multiple study abroad programs and decided that AFS looked like the one for me.

The application through AFS is relatively easy if you ignore how much time it takes to get everything put together, and it's all online. To start it off, you just submit basic information about yourself, including your name, age, contact information, your GPA (there's a 2.8 minimum), and your current top three countries that you'd like to go to, then you submit that along with the $75 application fee. From there, you get launched into the full application. There forms to fill out (boy, are there forms...), signatures to be signed, doctors to be visited, transcripts to be scanned, and letters of recommendation to be written. Aside from that, you upload photos of you and your family that might portray a portion of your interests and normal life. You make a final preference list for which countries you'd most like to go to. You type out your interests, your allergies, and a letter from you to your host family. You also need to have an in-home interview with a local volunteer about why you want to go abroad. Once you finish the application, you submit it before the deadline (usually in March I believe), and you wait for AFS volunteers to look it over and let you know what you need to review, update, or just plain redo. It's a lot easier than it sounds, I promise.

I submitted my application for the first time in early January, got told to review it and fix some stuff, then I resubmitted it towards the end of February. I got an email saying I was accepted on April 9th about 10 minutes before school started. Needless to say, I didn't pay very much attention that day; I was too consumed with excitement and the dread of having to play the waiting game for almost 5 more months.

In May, the mandatory Pre-Departure Orientation was in Eden Praire, MN, which was the one I went to since it was the closest.

My junior year ended, summer began, and the waiting game continued. So far this summer, I've distracted myself through working on some online classes so I can graduate when I get back, babysitting, Civil Air Patrol, and just plain having fun. The slow trickle of information about my upcoming adventure has been both torture (in the sense of omigodwhyisn'tthishappeningyet) and amazing (in the sense of omigodthisishappeningsosoon). I've gotten everything done that I need to with the exception of packing and wrapping up a few classes.

In 15 days, I'll leave my small-town home to go to Minneapolis. In 16 days, I'll be on a plane to New York City. In 17 days, I'll get on an airplane in NYC, and in 18 days, I'll land in Istanbul, Turkey. Crazy, huh?

See you soon!
Görüşmek üzere!

-Anika