<p>Our daughter is spending her junior year of high school in Italy. This is something she asked about doing at the beginning of her sophomore year and we allowed her to consider it on the condition that she earn at least a third of the money; fundraise for another third; and we would pay the rest.</p>
<p>Although we won't know for certain until August, she is likely to get enough credit from her school work in Italy that she will graduate with the rest of her class in 2012. However, she will have a very compressed schedule for looking at colleges compared to her classmates, and will have to catch up on things like tking the AP test.</p>
<p>I'm interested in hearing from other parents of students who either studied abroad in high school, or are abroad now and expect to be going to college in fall 2012.</p>
<p>My son studied abroad in France his sophomore year. He attended a French public high school and came home absolutely fluent in French. </p>
<p>Have you planned out her study program in Italy and her senior year? Where will she get credits, where will she need to make up credits? </p>
<p>Can she do some summer work if her math course (for example) will not transfer home?</p>
<p>Has she done SAT tests? I would do them NOW. My son had trouble with the PSAT taken in France after not thinking in English for a few months prior. She can always retake in senior year, but let’s get a baseline. Yes, I believe it is possible to take these tests in European countries, but not as easy to organize as it is here.</p>
<p>PM me if you have specific questions that I might be able to answer. My son’s program was not AFS or other agency program, but rather run through his high school. He was the only student abroad his year. He did have excellent college admissions results, despite slightly weaker grades and scores than his classmates due to his year off-track. </p>
<p>(Although his French SAT2 and his French AP were top notch, and he finished high school completing 6th year French and placed into third year college French which he breezed through as the only freshman in the class.)</p>
<p>Our daughter didn’t have any problem graduating with her class after her junior year abroad. She did miss out on AP tests, but took her ACT and SATs in Buenos Aires, where she was living, and did well enough that she didn’t have to retake them next fall. She did a lot of online research about schools while still in Argentina; we decided to actually visit only those schools to which she was accepted. In all, colleges are very understanding of the sacrifices students make to spend a semester or year abroad - in many ways it’s the ultimate EC, and it’s respected by adcoms. However, to ease up that packed senior year schedule, you may consider having your daughter take a class at a community college the summer when she comes back.</p>
<p>I would not ask her to sign up for summer school classes after coming back - reintegration is challenging, and dropping right into summer school would have been way too much overload for my D. </p>
<p>Italian schools get out a lot later than ours do; depending on the program she’s on, she might not be finishing until sometime in July anyway.</p>
<p>Yes, she’ll miss AP classes. I don’t think that’s a problem in the context of college admissions; adcoms aren’t at all blind to the exchange student realities and I think they understand the benefits.</p>
<p>If your child’s high school ranks students and uses weighted grades, the study abroad may hurt her ranking because the classes won’t be weighted. You could ask the guidance counselor whether that can be addressed in the counselor’s report to colleges. </p>
<p>D’s guidance counselor was a real blessing when she worked with us BEFORE D left to figure out exactly how she would meet all the graduation requirements, and the school abroad was helpful in sending a very detailed letter explaining her courses in the school, which enabled her school back here in the US to grant her credit for English, PE, Italian, and so on.</p>
<p>My D12 took a “gap year” exchange between sophomore and junior years of high school so she went from being a D11 to a D12. Obviously her experience applying for schools will be different than your daughter’s. However, I just wanted to mention that Beloit
College offers a nice scholarship to students who have taken an exchange year. It also isn’t the only school that values an exchange experience. For my D it wasn’t difficult to settle back in but I think that is because she had planned ahead and transferred from her local public to our state’s boarding school for gifted youth for her last two years. She still has friends from her old school but she also has a whole new peer group.</p>