The first month is the hardest thing you'll do
An account of arriving somewhere you don't speak the language, and what changed in month three.
Stories
What the year is actually like.
Not testimonials. Not a brochure. First-person accounts from District 7430 students, written after they came home, including the parts that were hard.
The archive
Nothing here yet, and that's the honest state of it
This page is built and waiting. What it needs is two or three real students willing to write a few hundred words about their year.
Pennsylvania was not what I pictured
An inbound student on American high school, host families, and the first time it snowed.
Nobody tells you about coming home
On reverse culture shock, and why ROTEX exists in the first place.
These three are titles, not articles. They show the shape of the
page. No invented student names, quotes or photos will go here. A fabricated
testimonial on a real youth organisation's site is not worth the placeholder it
replaces.
Write yours
You do not need to be a writer. You need to have gone.
The most useful thing on this entire website would be four hundred words from someone who actually did it. A prospective student reading a real account of a bad second month, and how it turned around, learns more than any page we can design for them.
What makes a good one
- Pick one thing. A single week, a single meal, the day it clicked. A month-by-month summary of the whole year is the one format that never works.
- Include the bad bit. The homesickness, the host family that was not a fit, the day you cried in a supermarket. That is the part readers trust.
- Four hundred to six hundred words. Longer is fine if it earns it.
- Say what you would tell yourself. The advice you needed in August.
When it is ready (or half-ready, we will help), email it to [email protected] with your name, country and year.
About photos
Send them, but know that Rotary requires signed written permission from anyone appearing in a photo or video, and since most exchange students are minors, that means a parent or guardian signature. We will not publish a face without one.
Send us your year
Inbound, outbound, this year's class or a decade ago: if you went through District 7430, we want it.