Student Exchange Program – My Personal Experience, Aspirations, Hopes, and Dreams

Since early childhood, I gradually learned about the United States as a large, multicultural country where the most popular international language in the world is spoken. In my opinion, this impression should be the first for every person and is a correct step in beginning to expand one's own boundaries, debunk stereotypes, and engage in cultural exchange within the framework of student exchange programs. At the age of 4, I learned that my dad, who worked in the gold mining industry, was gifted a trip to America. He went to the state of Nevada and visited Las Vegas, among other places, from where he later brought back many souvenirs that made me incredibly happy as a very small child. Back then, I realized it was very far from Khabarovsk, and I immediately became interested in what kind of place my dad had visited! Along with this, I was at home, attending kindergarten, and my mom was always with me—an English teacher by education and profession. When I was 4, she gave me a large children's Russian-English dictionary called "For the Little Ones," and I learned my first word at age 4 – butterfly.

Yes! My first word in English was "butterfly." I repeated the word after my mom, who also emphasized the American pronunciation of sounds in all words and articles during informal communication with me, and the English alphabet had been something natural to me from an early age thanks to "The ABC" song. My mom always insisted on having the correct pronunciation because it is, in fact, a quite powerful way to also immerse oneself in the country's culture at a confident pace. Through this combination of factors, a foundation was laid for my desire to learn about 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 gained in childhood are the most powerful in all of one's subsequent life!

By a twist of fate, at the age of 13, I ended up in a school with in-depth English studies and a mandatory second foreign language – Chinese! I was a little scared of 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 speakers, just as it was with English in my childhood.

At my school, there was an intern – 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, as she herself was a participant from Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Then, already knowing that I would definitely go to the United States for cultural exchange someday, I became even more inspired. I watched movies in English, studied the history of the USA from the time of the 13 colonies up to today, studied the American spirit of the fight for freedom and justice, and played games where, I think, I felt the spirit of America in the 1940s and 50s. Back then, I became deeply imbued with the idea of visiting the USA. I really want to know what a large multinational nation talks about and how it lives, what features of mentality people have, and what I could note for my future life during informal conversations that will touch upon the features of life in both Russia and the United States. I have always been attracted by the spirit of freedom, being a fairly independent person since childhood; I want to feel it for myself, meet local residents and make friends, adopt life experience, and implement the valuable, best things that I will receive during my trip around America, because only by physically being in the environment can one catch the subtle cultural nuances that a person can hardly find information about on the internet. Only by being in the environment can one dispel myths, verify the existence of certain well-known features, and feel the spirit of the country and its people, which I have already managed to experience through one of the exchange programs in the past. During the trip, I really want to see the real America, visit the beauty-alluring Zion National Park in Utah, where an acquaintance of mine who participated in Work and Travel 2022 had been, get to the state of Washington, where the world's largest aircraft manufacturing plant, Boeing, is located, drive through small towns in California, chat with locals, have fun together, talk, and grieve by the will of chance and fate, because this is the very "exchange" that everyone talks about. I want to finish the trip with a tour of the eastern USA and visit the world-famous states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania on the way to New York.

In 2019, by a lucky chance, I was offered to participate in an exchange program in China, to which I agreed – I obviously always wanted to gain cultural exchange experience abroad, and my first country turned out to be China. Once in Harbin, I underwent training in culture, and then went to the city of Nanjing – the former capital of imperial China. To my surprise, my culture teacher at Harbin Normal 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 issues, and even minority issues, in an open form! In the evenings, I played basketball with local students. I am not the best player, but I was struck by the fact that all the local guys were very calm about my little playing experience, supported me, and joked; this left me with an impression of the local population as good, understanding, and wise people. Outside the classroom, I talked with many Chinese people, most of whom mistook me for an Italian and always started a conversation in English. Being inside the country and its culture, I learned that China is a country deeply integrated into the system of globalization. Well-known Walmart, Starbucks, world hotel brands, and many others are deeply integrated into local life along with their own features, taste preferences, type of thinking, and traditions. People in China turned out to be kind and understanding; they always paid attention to a foreign citizen in my person and even started conversations on the streets and asked about Russia.

But I have always passionately desired to visit America since childhood. Now I am studying Management, the homeland of which is also the USA. I want to connect my life with communication between people, finding compromises, and becoming a manager and expert in this field. As I described earlier, in my opinion, only physical presence in a cultural environment will help to fully understand its features. Having visited the United States of America, I look forward with great impatience to finding out about the features of communication between people, how a person's life is organized, and understanding their psychology and worldview. During the trip, I want to visit several states and learn about the features of life in each of them, understand the culture of a person and their worldview from individual states. I also want to learn how the people of America come to compromises in difficult situations, from which no person is insured. Including participation in Work and Travel USA will help me find out about the features of communication and the work system in the context of seasonal intensive work, which can serve as invaluable experience in my further personal and professional development in Russia. In my view, my country is in great need of leaders with the skill of communicating with a wide variety of people and leaders with extensive cultural experience. My trip under the Work and Travel USA program will give me invaluable cultural exchange experience 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 won't find in an online format, while simultaneously informing them about the features of Russia. After all, any dialogue built on the basis of cultural exchange consists, first and foremost, of the mutual transfer of information. I believe that it is precisely such an experience that will help achieve the most profound, productive result in an exchange program. Having been in China for 2 weeks a long time ago, I realized that the downside of many exchange programs is their very short duration; I also realized that one needs to come to a cultural environment specifically to "live," because that is how one can fully gain invaluable experience of being in a society, and in the end, return to one's homeland with a rich baggage of knowledge in the field of "soft skills" and "hard skills" with a very fine-tuned understanding of how life in the USA is organized, and apply the gained international exchange experience in 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 for this, and, of course, greater accessibility for as many people as possible. It seems to me that the trend towards the globalization of cultural exchanges and the study of the cultural characteristics of people from different countries will only intensify, and I really want to experience the experience of an exchange trip to the USA for myself in the near future.