<p>Back in the day, I did a gap year as an exchange student. DD is interested in being an exchange student, but maybe during HS instead.</p>
<p>Anyone had kids do an Exchange Student stint overseas while in HS? Wondering how that would work with required classes, transcripts etc when applying for college.</p>
<p>Recommendations for any particular program(s)?</p>
<p>My SIL hosted a HS exchange student from Canada. And my Boss’ D spent a year in one of the Baltic states. Neither student was an academic superstar, so issues like curricula weren’t a problem. However, both students were “off the charts” independent and adventuresome. That was a problem for both hosting families. (E.g., “I came halfway around the world, alone, to take classes in a foreign language. Surely I can be trusted to stay out past nine.”</p>
<p>My daughter, who is a high school senior, spent her junior year in Perugia, Italy, in a program sponsored by AFS. She had a fantastic time. She walked off the plane in Rome in September 2010 knowing little Italian; she walked back into her high school in August 2011 enrolled in the school’s AP Italian (although this may say mroe about the state of foreign language teaching in the U.S. than my daughter’s fluency).</p>
<p>My daughter has a 3.3 GPA. She came back with a packet of information from the Italian high school she attended that allowed her high school to adjust her transcript to account for the classes she took. She basically was given an “A” for Italian and “pass” for the other classes.</p>
<p>Before she left, and as we were planning for this year abroad, she had several meetings with her dean to make sure that a year abroad wouldn’t interfere with her graduating with the rest of her class. Because she had already taken most of the required classes for graduation, she only had to take a couple of classes this year as a senior that would otherwise have taken as a junior. (She’s also taking driver’s ed as a senior.)</p>
<p>We wouldn’t have let her do this if we didn’t think she was emotionally prepared and mature enough to do this. She worked part-time the entire year before she left, in order to pay for a third of the costs of the year abroad. She did not have a clear niche in ther hifg school, i.e., she wasn’t a jock, a straight “A” student, an artist, a musician, etc. She WAS looking for something that would make her stand out in a college application.</p>
<p>The summer between her freshman and sophomore year she spent a month with a group of high schoolers in Costa Rica on a service project (sponsored by Walking Tree Travel, another great organization). This month out of her comfort zone inspired her to convince her parents that she could study abroad in high school.</p>
<p>We were against it from the beginning for a variety of reasons, but she did a very good job of proving to us that she would make it work. and it did.</p>
<p>Now, she’s in the process of applying for colleges. She has a narrow field of places she is looking at – she wants to be in an urban enviroment and most of what she is looking at is in Chicago. But we are encouraging her to look at Colleges That Change Lives schools like Beloit (which actually has a scholarship available, I guess, for students who have lived abroad in high school).</p>
<p>So, we have no regrets, so far, about her choice and our decision to let her go. Of course, there is the Italian boyfriend who is coming to the states for the first time for two weeks at the end of December – that will be interesting.</p>
<p>Oh, our daughter also did most of the research on programs that offered study abroad options for high school – there are a number of them, although AFS has been around the longest. AFS did the basics – they arranged for her safe travel to and from her destinations in Italy and found a great host family for her to stay with The rest of their support was only so-so. Probably in part because they depend so much on volunteers to do their work – it was at times a bit frustrating to deal with them. Again, it helped that my daughter had the maturity to deal with a lot of issues on her own and did not require a lot of help from us (other than money) if she hit a rough spot during her 10 months abroad.</p>
<p>[Welcome</a> to Cultures Shocked!](<a href=“http://www.cultures-shocked.org%5DWelcome”>http://www.cultures-shocked.org) is a good web site for information. Rotary International has one of the least expensive programs, but students split their stay between three host families and are not always guaranteed their first choice country. AFS is well-regarded in our community.</p>
<p>Newhope: Exchanging from Canada to US? Hmmm… </p>
<p>ptc: thanks for the info. Interesting about ‘pass’ option. Just not sure how she could get all the ‘recommended’ courses for top schools if she was gone for a year. </p>
<p>toledo: I went through Rotary and it was very cheap. The three host family thing actually was good to get exposure to different families, and your previous families became your ‘extended’ family which was great. Like they’d invite you along for a cool trip they were going on even if you were no longer with them, etc.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info. Somethings to think about…</p>
<p>I did Rotary to England and my brother did it to Finland, both during our jr. years. I think its effect on college apps/hs graduation will depend on your high school’s flexibility, the requirements of the colleges to which you apply, and where you go. Since I went to England, it was easy for my classes (math, physics, english, and history) to count…less so for my brother, since all his classes were in Finnish, which he couldn’t speak very well.</p>
<p>I took the SATs while there (it was a total pain; they got someone from my high school to proctor it) and I’m pretty sure it made no sense in retrospect; I should’ve just done it when I came home. We also worked something out for the PSATs but I don’t remember what…i was a National Merit Scholar, though, so it obviously worked.</p>
<p>More importantly than all of this, I learned a lot that year about myself, another culture, etc. I was a lot better prepared for college as a result. BUT. I was pretty miserable my senior year. Exchange students and their families were told it’s usually harder to return home than to go abroad, especially if the exchange student liked the experience. I missed my friends in England and my hose family and was really bummed to be back in high school with the same old people (only they’d had another year to bond and I felt left out). There were good things that year but mostly I just wanted to go to college. If I had to do it again, I think I would have graduated from high school a year early, deferred college, and gone away as a gap year. Not for academic reasons but because it was hard to live with the freedom of my parents’ rules after the looser rules of studying abroad.</p>
<p>I went abroad my junior year to Switzerland with a program called AFS. It’s definitely a super good program, and I don’t regret doing it at all; all my credits transferred and it was an amazing experience.
It’s true that coming back is sort of rough; while living abroad, students tend to have a lot more independence and being forced back into the high school mold and living in the 'burbs can be difficult.
I’m also an AFS Volunteer now, so if you have questions about AFS you can contact me. 
Look at afsusa.org.</p>
<p>As to your original question: D’s high school counselor was very cooperative, as was the high school in general. With planning, it was not a problem. I think colleges understood it well, and I’m sure it was a help, not a hindrance in the college admissions process. But … we did a LOT of planning. D took the ACT before she went abroad. It might not have been a problem to take the SAT overseas, but she ended up in a very rural area where the nearest offering was in a different country, and AFS rules would not have allowed her to go there on her own to take it, especially as it would involve an overnight stay. The “report” from her host school was extremely detailed and very nice. However, with many of these programs, you don’t have a choice as to which kind of high school your kid will be in, and quite a few of the high schools are specialized. D ended up in a languages high school, where the math was basically at middle school level, but kids studied five languages. </p>
<p>D seemed to find the transition to college very, very easy after the exchange experiences.</p>
<p>hmm… Hadn’t thought about the coming back for senior year angle. That could be a real downer, esp in the pretty parochial area we live in. </p>
<p>Also, not sure how one would do PSAT for NMS during Jr. year. </p>
<p>Maybe I’ll push toward doing it as a gap year after HS graduation. That worked well for me with the college transition also. But part of the incentive is that she wants a wider experience than is available in our boring small town HS.</p>
<p>“Newhope: Exchanging from Canada to US?”</p>
<p>Yeah, there were a few raised eyebrows around here too. I’m speculating that the girl wanted a “big city” experience … or that she wanted to work on her English. (I believe she was from Quebec.) I know she visited a number of American cities before and after she graduated. Very nice person.</p>
<p>^^ Quebec is another country… at least in their mind.</p>
<p>Yeah, I missed the PSAT because I was abroad. But I still don’t regret going abroad at all.</p>
<p>Our daughter spent a high school Junior semester+ in the Eisendrath International Exchange ([NFTY-EIE</a> - Home](<a href=“http://www.nftyeie.org/]NFTY-EIE”>http://www.nftyeie.org/)), in Israel. I think that it was a fantastic experience for her and she learned how to live with groups of peers while studying intensively - so that going to college represented virtually no transition at all. She also learned a great deal about another country, and perhaps drank a little too much Kool-Aid about Judaism and Israel. </p>
<p>The biggest problem was that she went for her Fall semester, so it was tough going back to high school in the middle of the year. Many of her courses matched up pretty well, but others (Chem and Math) did not, so she struggled a little. Also, throughout the remainder of her Junior and he Senior year, she constantly muttered, “I am SO DONE with high school!”. What saved her was the dual enrollment system in our state ([Running</a> Start](<a href=“http://www.k12.wa.us/SecondaryEducation/CareerCollegeReadiness/RunningStart.aspx]Running”>Course-Based Dual Credit | OSPI)) that allowed her to get combined high school and college credit for attending the local community college.</p>
<p>Our daughter learned a great deal - perhaps the biggest lesson was how to be out on her own, a lesson that some college students clearly take too long to learn.</p>
<p>There are also some great summer options if the OP’s D decides not to go for a full year. For example, my D did this program about 5 years ago:</p>
<p>[Youth</a> For Understanding USA - Scholarships](<a href=“http://yfuusa.org/scholarships/finland-us-senate-youth-exchange-program-12.php]Youth”>Youth For Understanding USA) </p>
<p>She was gone most of the summer, and spent it on a homestay on a farm in Finland. They also spent a week in Helsinki, and did a few side trips as well.</p>