🍓 I could have stayed home, finished 11th grade, gotten my diploma, and applied to college (even in the US).
🍓 BUT instead—
- I skipped my senior year,
- I’m not taking the Russian exams,
- I’m not getting my high school diploma this year,
- I just packed up and moved to the USA.
🍓 And I have ZERO regrets! Why?
🍓 Because I’ve always dreamed of studying at a university in America.
- Yes, there are a million challenges: language, applications, culture, adaptation, moving, money…
✓ LANGUAGE:
- There’s literally no better way to learn it. Now I’ll go to university with a solid base👌🏼
- Feeling confident in English is the #1 thing when living abroad.
- On exchange, you usually end up in a small town — real America! Around me, I’m the only Russian speaker, the only exchange student.
- At first, it was frustrating.
- But then I realized: I speak only English, and it works perfectly for my fluency 🔝 (especially if you take away my phone and camera).
✓ COLLEGE APPLICATIONS:
- American students apply in November–December, a year before they start! By January, many already have offers and are hunting for scholarships👌🏼
- So yeah, the timelines don’t really match with the Russian system.
- The hardest part? Filling out all the paperwork.
✓ CULTURE & ADAPTATION:
- If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know: adapting isn’t easy.
- And trust me—you don’t want to go through that again once you’re already in college, and without the support of a host family. (Host parents help A LOT!!!!)
- You need time to get used to the mindset, to live with it, to understand it.
✓ MONEY:
College in the US isn’t free. But there are scholarships, grants, financial aid. It’s so much easier to figure this out from the inside.
🍓 And what if you realize you don’t even like America, but you’ve already signed up for a super expensive college?
- Being an exchange student is the perfect way to test it out.
🍓 You get to see how the education system actually works—not from stories, but by living it.
🍓 Plus, who doesn’t want to feel like they’re inside an American movie?
🍓 But the BEST part: meeting amazing people ❤️ (and yes, having your heart broken later 😭😭).
🍓 Being an exchange student is basically a trial version of studying at an American university.
Try it yourself — write your own exchange story and become an exchange student!