Getting off the traditional path

“I’m not going to college,” I matter-of-factly told my parents one afternoon. “Or at least, not right away,” I added just to keep them from passing out.

After earning straight A’s throughout high school and a member of the National Honor Society, I was not the typical poster board problem child and my parents were not thrilled with my recent epiphany.

But let me digress and explain how this all began. 
When I graduated from high school, I believed, as all newly graduated students do, that I was ready to take on the world.

With plans to major in communications and international relations, I was excited to attend college to pursue a career filled with traveling and languages. There was only one small problem: I had never been out of the country and my first language, English, was also my only.

For an international communications major, my ability to communicate with the rest of the world was frighteningly limited.

This was only further exacerbated over the course of my teenage years, as I met exchange students from a variety of countries who spoke not one or two, but three or four different languages.

With trilingual replacing bilingual as the edge in the international forum, being just “lingual” in English was not enough as I struggled to communicate with my new acquaintances.

So when I learned that many of my international friends were taking a ‘gap’ year, an accepted European practice defined as a year off between high school graduation and college enrollment and typically filled with international travel, I decided to pursue one as well.

After all, I could use an education in culture and language that I could not possibly glean from sitting in a classroom; at least, not a classroom in the United States.

As it turns out, English is not the most widely spoken language in the world. Mandarin is the first, spoken by over one billion people, followed by English, Hindi and Spanish.

With a burgeoning South American market and over 425 million Spanish speakers, I decided that my three years of basic high school Spanish would simply not suffice if I were to pursue international communications. Thus, I decided to make the life changing decision of taking a year off to explore a different culture and learn another language.

My decision to pursue Spanish was also a result of the Hispanic population’s increasing influence in American society. After all, you can cast a vote, withdraw money from an ATM, and watch television in Spanish in the U.S. (although you may have a difficult time ordering a cheese steak). Taking a year off to learn Spanish was therefore not only an experience of a lifetime, but practical as well.

My parents eventually realized that there was no changing my mind and they agreed to support my decision—“but only for the sake of furthering her education,” they would tell you.
After some research, I was interviewed and accepted by the Rotary International Youth Exchange Program and later learned that I would be traveling to Argentina for the year and living with three different host families.

Although my Spanish is limited to high school phrases, the most exciting aspect of this journey is that I have the opportunity to become a part of another culture. I hope to assimilate into, not merely live alongside, the customs, culture, and language of Argentina in what will certainly involve some outrageous antics and stories about cultural confusion and misunderstandings along the way.

I hope that you, as readers, will join me on this journey, this education of a lifetime, culturally speaking. Most of all, I hope that the discoveries we will make over this year will inspire you to travel and test the borders that often isolate Americans—after all, life is too short not to have at least one adventure.

Back