Over a year ago, as I was making college decisions and graduating from Marietta High School, I received an email that changed my entire life. I was awarded a scholarship through the State Department funded program NSLI-Y (National Security Language Initiative for Youth) to spend an entire school year studying in Beijing, China. A few months later I was boarding a plane, saying goodbye to my life in the USA for nine months, for a new life on the other side of the world. I was filled with so many expectations, but really I had no idea how this year was going to turn out. Still I knew it was going to be the adventure of a lifetime.

After a short orientation in Washington D.C. with 14 other teens from across the U.S., we were on our way to our final destination, Beijing No. 80 High School. Two flights and 14 hours later, I was on a bus, headed to my home for the next nine months, looking out the window at the massive sprawl of Beijing. All the ideas I had created about the school over the summer were replaced with reality. All I could think was “Nora, what have you gotten yourself into?” But over the next few months I settled into my new life. I made friends with Chinese students as well as fellow international students from America, Korea, Russia, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Brazil and other countries. I got used to dorm life (it is common for high school students to live in dorms on their school campus), and made myself at home on weekends and holidays with my Chinese host family, becoming the oldest daughter of three for my host parents. Over the next few months I often had many “Wow I can’t believe this is my life” moments: riding the subway and taking the bus for the first time by myself, competing in a track meet at my high school, seeing Tiananmen Square on the Chinese National Day (China’s equivalent of the Fourth of July), giving my 4-year-old host sister a piggyback ride on the Great Wall and using my mediocre Chinese skills to talk to our 93-year-old great grandmother. Many of these moments would have never happened if I was just another American tourist in China instead of an exchange student.

My biggest accomplishment this year will not be my language gains, as I expected it to be. It will be what I have gained as a person; I have been able to make the uncomfortable, comfortable. Now when I go back to Marietta at the end of May, I can call Beijing, a place so far away and so amazingly different from my hometown, home.