I thought I'd write a bit of different kind of post today. As some of you know, I spent a year as an exchange student in Oklahoma, USA in 2011-2012. One of the main reasons I wanted to do it was to learn new things. It's been over 2 years now since I got back to Finland and I've finally started figuring out how much I actually learned during that year and how it changed me. Obviously I can speak English much better now and I learned a bunch of things in school during that year but what I'm going to focus on this post are the life lessons that I learned that you can't learn in school. As someone who moved across the country from the city I've lived my whole life in just few months ago, I'm even more thankful to my parents, host parents, friends and everyone who was involved in my exchange year. It was definitely the best year of my life and here's how it has helped me with moving out, starting a new school and living alone.
I used to be the person who never wanted to really do too many things out of my comfort zone but there is no comfort zone when you're an exchange student. There is no one to translate what you want to say, your home is somewhere across the world, you don't know anyone, some things are done so differently than in your home country... The list is endless. You just have to learn to step out of your comfort zone and that is probably one of the biggest things I learned and I feel like it has opened up so many great things in my life.
Moving across the country would have probably never even been a thought in my head if I hadn't been an exchange student. Now that I've lived across the world for a year, moving across the country didn't even seem like a big deal. I was way more excited than nervous about the move, actually. Of course it felt bad to leave my family and friends but at least we would be in the same country, I would go back home for school holidays and we could call each other as much as we want.
Another thing I learned was to be more independent. I've heard so many times that there will be this stage in living alone where I'm going to feel really lonely and homesick but I don't think I had that too badly. Even though I lived with a family in the USA, I feel like I somehow learned to be more on my own. It's really hard to put in words but somehow the exchange year helped me with feeling less lonely while living alone.
Living so far away from my friends and family probably would've felt a lot worse if I didn't live across the world for a year. And like I said before, we can still see each other on school holidays and we can call, text and skype each other as much as we want. If we survived a year without seeing each other, we can survive this :D
Making new friends was totally the thing I was most nervous about during both my exchange year and moving over here. Somehow I managed to meet such amazing people both times though. Making new friends is also a tiny bit easier now because if I somehow managed to make friends in the USA in a foreign language, it shouldn't be too hard to do in my first language.
There are so many more life lessons I learned during that year but these are the main ones I can think about right now. It's absolutely amazing to see that even after two years I still find new things about how that year changed me. It would be so amazing if everyone had a chance to be an exchange student because it teaches you so much and lets you see things in such a different way. I will be forever thankful that I got to experience such an amazing thing.
See you soon!
~Susanna
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