Traveling to a different country and being surrounded by foreign high school students can be a pretty nerve wracking experience, but it can also be a learning experience filled with surprises. Not many people get the unique opportunity to be put in a different environment outside of their usual culture and location for a few weeks. The group of Austrian exchange students who arrived in New York City on Jan. 31–and who eventually made their way to Ashburn on Feb. 2– are part of that small group of lucky individuals.

On the first leg of their trip, the Austrian students spent the weekend exploring NYC and enjoying various famous landmarks and other sights such as the Empire State Building, Central Park, and the American Museum of Natural History. On Feb. 2, they departed from New York City and headed to Rock Ridge High School where they and their host families went through the process of orientation.

Exchange student Lili Molnar was surprised when she first arrived at the school. The student body of her entire school is around as big as the amount of students in each grade at Rock Ridge. “[The school] is huge; there are so many people and kids,” Molnar said. “Our school system is very different. We only had around 400 people at our school.”

In order to participate in this exchange program, the Austrian students were involved in a competitive school-wide process in which students who were interested in participating were individually interviewed and selected. In total, Rock Ridge hosted 25 exchange students.

For RRHS German teacher Scott Reimert, the biggest hardship in organizing the event lies not in the interaction with the students itself, but in the preparation for their arrival and their housing. “There’s a lot to organize because I need to find host families for the students involved, [and] make sure the families understand what is involved in hosting, as well as organizing the field trips for the visiting students to make the excursions into DC or wherever they might go,” Reimert said. “And there’s a lot of organization that goes into all of that. It’s always a struggle to find host families, but in the end, the Rock Ridge community always comes through, and I always manage to find enough families to host everybody.”

Families who signed up were informed about the program and what was required of them. The Austrian students would follow a Rock Ridge student’s schedule, visiting them in classes, as well as joining them for lunch. They would then end their school day by going home with their host student to their family.

Sarah Eaton, an English teacher who is originally from the U.S. and is currently working and living in Austria, organized the trip for the Austrian students. As someone who experienced the transition from one country’s culture to another, she had an understanding of the hardships and culture shocks the foreign students could face. “Austria is nowhere near as diverse as the United States, and that can present a challenge to some of our students because they’re just not used to that level of diversity, not just in things like languages and ethnicity but also in food,” Eaton said. “They’re used to their food, and they don’t stray very much from that. Those are some of the biggest hurdles. The things that they know about the US that they get from TV shows and [other media]. Those are the things that they feel are familiar.”

The benefits of these exchange programs don’t just include the aspect of these students learning about different cultures and their traditions, but also the social and friendship-building side of the trips. “Several host families have told me that they are still in contact with their host student from two or four years ago,” Reimert said. “One family told me that [an Austrian student] went to Portugal, with their [host student]. So building this lifelong friendship between two groups of people is really cool.”

Additionally, Eaton believes that the exchange allows for students to expose themselves to things that are different from them, which leads to a better understanding and a more well-developed mindset about the world. “We look at the world as a whole, and we look at the politics of the world at the moment, and things are insane,” Eaton said. “We’re seeing intolerance on the rise. We are seeing people going back to hating and fighting instead of trying to work together. I truly believe that when you have young people and you expose them to other ways of life and other cultures, they will be more understanding and more open-minded going forward as adults.”