The Origins of the Beginnings of a Journey

Hello, my name is Grant and I am a high school junior from suburban Ohio that applied for the prestigious State Department CBYX (Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange) Scholarship to live and study abroad in Germany for one academic year. This blog is my attempt to document my life leading up to the exchange, my time in country, and the time immediately after my return to these United States of America.

Now, some backstory.

Summer 2013

It was during the midpoint of band-camp that I seriously began to consider exchange. I had been thinking about it for years, ever since seeing something about foreign exchange students on one of my childhood PBS shows. This idea had been bouncing around in my head for a while in high school, but I had never acted upon it until this point. Travel has always appealed to me for some reason. The long road trips to the beach, or the long waits in airport security have never bothered me. Contrary to most people, I love airports. They have an electric sense of excitement, people coming, people going, everyone with somewhere to go, a story for every destination. This carefully choreographed chaos makes me feel alive. But that point is greatly overridden in the case of student exchange for one very important reason. STUDENT EXCHANGE IS NOT A VACATION. It is life in another culture for a year, not an extended vacation. I embrace this concept because it allows me to satisfy my main passion: Knowledge. I want to know and experience what it is like to live in another culture. I want to understand the culture. I want to understand why things happen as they do. And in this case I want to learn about and experience the German culture, but also to understand it.

So it came to pass that I did finally act on my dream of going on exchange to Germany. I googled Germany exchange program scholarship and immediately found CBYX. I read through the first page and resolved to apply, and somehow get myself to Germany before college.

Fall/Winter 2013/2014

The application came out for AFS during the middle of the government shutdown in October. I had been checking everyday for it since mid September and was so excited to get started on it. Over the course of the next few months I worked steadily on the application until Winter Break. Over those ten days, I put almost ten hours a day into those essays and went through around nine versions of each one. I put everything I had into those. Then, on the second to last day of Winter Break, with the deadline closing in on me fast I hit submit button. After I submitted it, I felt sick. It was the entirety of the purpose of the previous three months of my life coalescing into one click to determine whether or not my dream would become reality.

Winter/Spring 2014

The interviews were announced a few weeks after the final application deadline. On the day of mine it snowed an unbelievable amount and made the quest to the interview the most stressful, harrowing drive of my life. More on the interviews sometime in the future.

Spring 2014

It was the week after I had been on the Americanism and Government Test Award Trip (see References page) and was at my local Legion talking about my experience when I received the news about my application status. The email said that I had been selected as an alternate. The news although happy in a way was saddening. I still did not know where I was going to be next year. I responded to the email's prompt about accepting your place as an alternate and participated in the first conference call.

Now fast forward to May 2nd, 2014. I was sitting in German class reading after having just completed a quiz. Then my phone vibrated. It vibrated once for an email. I got my tablet out to see what it was, never for one second thinking that it could be the email that I had been waiting for for a month. When I turned on the tablet, I saw "CBYX Status Change RESPONSE REQUIRED" in my Gmail. I almost stopped breathing for a few seconds. After collecting myself, I clicked the notification and read the email. At the "Dear Grant, Congratulations!" part I knew that my dream had finally been realized. I had the chance to go on exchange to Germany. For a few moments I sat at my desk not knowing what to do. Then I got up, showed my German teacher the email, and asked if I could call my Dad. He said yes, so I called my Dad and told him the news. We were both ecstatic that I could finally achieve the dream that I had worked so hard for.

More to come.