<p>I lived in Southeast Asia for 2 years in middle school. this is general because I do not want to post all my academic info yet but in general circumstances would international experience bring interest to a college?</p>
<p>Yes, I think so.</p>
<p>Also interested in this, bump.</p>
<p>I don’t think so. I lived in Korea for 7 years, I don’t think that adds much.</p>
<p>I’m no officer or expert but I imagine that how much they care varies per applicant.</p>
<p>Not all overseas experiences are comparable. By itself, two years in middle school is not that interesting (although worth a mention) - lots of kids live overseas at some point in their lives. If you did it in high school as a foreign exchange student - that would be rather impressive because it takes unusual maturity and independence. If the experience has had an impact on what you plan to study, your language skills, your future career, then yes, it helps somewhat. If it was just two middle school years abroad at the American school while your parent worked somewhere, then less impressive/interesting.</p>
<p>heres some of my international experience…I lived in London for a year when i was 5, I lived in indonesia for 2 years in middle school. ANd I travelled all over asia. In 7th grade I went on a trip to egypt with students in my Indonesian school to study egyptian history (which is what we were learning for history at the time). my parents are both from peru, I will be taking AP chinese as a junior this fall, I am going to China this summer to study chinese and to live with a chinese family for a month. I speak English and Spanish and soon chinese and I wish to learn german in the future. Do you guys think that this international experience is good for me?</p>
<p>And I also hosted a chinese student for a 3 weeks this past winter…</p>
<p>^ straw grasping here?</p>
<p>well sorry T26E4 im really desperate for colleges to see this stuff, im only going to be a junior and im freaking out whether my dream college will accept me or not</p>
<p>9497: I’m sorry if I was curt. Sincerely, I think that you should focus on the essentials: a super solid GPA and great test scores. These small items you are listing are very very insignificant in comparison.</p>
<p>As to whether your dream college will accept you: isn’t the dream college by defn a reach – i.e. very unlikely to accept you and most others? I say this to sway you from fethisizing any particular school. The fact is, you can do only your best and even then, you and many others may or will be found wanting. Therefore it’s best to set yourself up not to “freak out” over any school – rather, be confident that you’ll be able to contribute greatly to whichever school is lucky enough to have you.</p>
<p>Best of luck to you.</p>
<p>Harvard does seem to care. They are very specific on their supplement about listing years spent abroad. I don’t remember seeing it on other supplements but I don’t know every supplement either.</p>
<p>If you are interested in making sure colleges are aware of it, make sure you mention living in these various countries growing up and how those unique experiences give you a different perspective than your average high school graduate.</p>
<p>As T26E4 mentions, none of this will help unless you do well in school and on your tests. This is a booster and differentiator when you make the initial cuts.</p>
<p>Hey, what about time abroad in high school? Like most of high school? I’m currently in Central Asia right now (as a sophomore in a tiny international school) and I might be either in Russia or somewhere in America for my senior year, don’t know.</p>
<p>But honestly, I don’t think that experience abroad is anything by itself unless it affects your interests in college or language skills. Or something. And of course you need the solid GPA and scores behind it all.</p>
<p>If you’ve spent most of your high school in Central Asia, then I think that reflects a ‘unique life experience’ and one that schools will be interested in. Hopefully, you are someone with intellectual curiosity and have spent the last 3 years learning something about your host country rather than living in the expat compound, and can speak with some authority about that culture (not to mention some of the local language). Surely attending a small international school has impacted who you are as well. So yes, I think it’s noteworthy, especially when compared to 2 years in middle school.</p>
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<p>Moreover, depending on the selectivity of your “dream school,” the reality may even be that you wind up disappointed without exactly having been “found wanting.” There are thousands of applicants every year who are disappointed not to get the fat envelope from T26E4’s alma mater even though there’s nothing at all the matter with them. The College is simply full. There’s no more room in the freshman dorms, no more foodservice capacity, no more desk space in the lecture halls, no more space to study in the libraries. So, out of many thousand highly qualified applicants, a minority of them were selected for some reason, and a majority of them weren’t selected–often for no particular reason.</p>
<p>This is why I hate the very notion of a “dream school.” It sets so many smart, ambitious young people up for bitter disappointment. I know sometimes a teen is going to fall in love with a college or university, and nobody can do anything about it, but I think a lot of college applicants would be much happier if we all somehow believed that having a “dream school” is a burden, and not an expected part of a middle- to upper-class American upbringing.</p>
<p>To return to your question, 9497sam, if your dream school is already a reach for you, I think it’s unlikely that having spent two years of middle school abroad will make a big difference. Unless, as others have said, you can pinpoint how that experience has shaped the person you’re becoming now–by sparking an academic interest of yours, or by generating an interest (that you’ve acted upon) in world politics or social justice, or something like that.</p>
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