Student Exchange Program – my personal experience, aspirations, hopes and dreams

Since early childhood I in one way or another gradually learned about the United States as a large, multicultural country where people speak the world’s most popular international language – in my opinion, this impression should be the first for everyone and is the right step at the beginning of the desire to expand one’s own boundaries, dispel stereotypes and engage in cultural exchange within student exchange programs. At the age of 4 I learned that my father, through his work in the gold mining industry, had been given a trip to vacation in America. Back then he went to the state of Nevada and, among other places, visited Las Vegas, from where he later brought many souvenirs that I was insanely happy about as a very small child. Then I realized that it was very far from Khabarovsk, and I immediately became curious about what kind of place my father had been to?! At the same time I was at home and attended kindergarten, and my mother was always with me – she is an English teacher by education and by profession. When I was 4 she also gave me a large children’s Russian-English dictionary called "For the Very Young", and I learned my first word at 4 – butterfly.

Yes! My first English word was the word “butterfly.” I repeated the word after my mother, who, moreover, emphasized the American variant of sounds in all words and articles in our informal conversations, and the English alphabet was already something natural for me from an early age thanks to the song "The ABC." My mother always insisted on having the correct pronunciation, because this is actually quite a powerful way to also immerse oneself in the culture of a country at a confident pace. With this combination of factors, I had a foundation laid for the desire to learn foreign cultures and languages, a foundation for the desire to understand, first and foremost, American society and its culture, because the emotions, desires and expectations formed in childhood are the most powerful throughout one’s subsequent life!

By a twist of fate, at the age of 13 I found myself in a school with an advanced study of English and a mandatory second foreign language – Chinese! I was somewhat frightened by the fact that I would have to learn Chinese, but I decided that since I had started, I would do it with immersion in the culture, pronunciation and traditions of the native people, just as it had been with English in my childhood.

In my school there was an intern student – a future teacher of English and Chinese, who temporarily taught me Chinese. Surprisingly, it was from her that I learned about many features of the Work and Travel USA program when I was 14, since she herself had been a participant from Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Already knowing then that I would definitely someday go to the United States for cultural exchange, I became even more passionate. I watched films in English, studied the history of the USA from the time of the 13 colonies up to today, studied the American spirit of struggle for freedom and justice, and also played games in which, I think, I felt the spirit of America of the 1940s and 1950s. Then I became deeply inspired by the idea of visiting the USA. I really want to learn what people talk about and how a large multinational nation lives, what peculiarities of mentality people have, so that I could note things for my future life during informal conversations that will touch on the particularities of life both in Russia and in the United States. I have always been attracted by the spirit of freedom, being quite independent since childhood; I want to feel it myself, meet local people and make friends, adopt life experience and implement the valuable, the best, that I will obtain during my trip through America, because only by physically being in an environment can one catch the barely noticeable cultural nuances that are hard to find on the internet. Only by being in the environment can one dispel myths, confirm the presence of certain well-known traits, feel the spirit of the country and its people, which I already managed to feel through one exchange program in the past. During my trip I very much want to see the real America, visit the Zion national park in Utah, which attracted one of my acquaintances who participated in Work and Travel 2022, reach the state of Washington, where the world’s largest aircraft manufacturing plant Boeing is located, drive through small towns in California, talk with locals, have fun together, chat, grieve by chance and fate, because that is the very comprehensive "exchange" everyone talks about. I want to finish the trip with a trip along the East of the USA and visit the world-famous states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania on the way to New York.

In 2019, by a fortunate coincidence I was offered to participate in an exchange program in China, which I agreed to – I, obviously, have always wanted to gain experience of cultural exchange abroad, and my first country turned out to be China. Having arrived in Harbin, I underwent cultural training there and then went to Nanjing – the former capital of imperial China. To my surprise, my culture instructor at Harbin Pedagogical University turned out to be a very open person. We openly discussed the history of China, the Chinese love for Russian ice cream, sharp political questions and even minority issues, in an open manner! In the evenings I played basketball with local students. I am not the best player, but I was struck by how calmly all the local guys treated my little experience in the game, supported me, joked, and this left an impression of the local population as good, understanding and wise people. Outside of the cultural classes I communicated with many Chinese, most of whom took me for an Italian and always started conversations in English. Being inside the country and its culture, I learned that China is a country deeply integrated into the system of globalization. The well-known Walmart, Starbucks, global hotel brands and many others are deeply integrated into local life alongside their own peculiarities, taste preferences, modes of thinking and traditions. People in China turned out to be kind and understanding; they always paid attention to a foreign citizen such as myself and even started conversations on the streets asking about Russia.

But I have always passionately wanted to visit America since childhood. I am currently studying Management; the homeland of this science is also the USA. I want to tie my life to communication between people, to finding compromises, to become a manager and an expert in this field. As I have already described, in my opinion, only physical presence in a cultural environment will help to fully understand its features. Visiting the United States of America, I very eagerly wish to learn about the features of communication between people, how a person’s life is organized and to understand his psychology and worldview. During the trip I want to visit several states and learn the peculiarities of life in each of them, to understand the culture of the people and their worldviews in individual states. I also want to find out how American people reach compromises in difficult situations, which no one is immune to. Participation in Work and Travel USA will also help me learn about the specifics of communication and the work system in the context of seasonal intensive work, which can serve as invaluable experience for my further personal and professional development in Russia. In my view, my country is severely lacking leaders with communication skills with a wide range of people and leaders with broad cultural experience. My trip through the Work and Travel USA program will give me priceless experience of cultural exchange while being in a multicultural society; I will be able to gain the knowledge and values of the multinational people of the USA that you cannot find online, while at the same time informing others about the peculiarities of Russia. After all, any dialogue built on the basis of cultural exchange consists, first and foremost, of mutual information transfer. I believe that such an experience will help achieve the deepest, most productive result in an exchange program. Having once been in China for 2 weeks long ago, I realized that a drawback of many exchange programs is their very short duration; I also realized that one must come to a cultural environment to "live" in it, because that is how one can fully gain invaluable experience of being in a society, and ultimately return home with a rich baggage of knowledge in the area of "soft skills" and "hard skills" with a very fine-tuned understanding of how life is organized in the USA, and apply the experience of international exchange to literally thousands of small things that will make my life and the lives of those around me better. Therefore in the future I see exchange programs as more inclusive, to give people the opportunity to interact more closely with a sufficient amount of time and, of course, greater accessibility for as many people as possible. It seems to me that the trend toward the globalization of cultural exchanges and the study of cultural characteristics of people from different countries will only strengthen, and I very much want to experience an exchange trip to the USA myself in the near future.