A Years Worth of Experience in a Semester

If you can’t host a student for a whole academic year there is the option to host for a semester, or half a year. But how do you fit a year’s worth of experiences in one semester? Each semester has its own “events”; for example fall has Halloween and Thanksgiving whereas spring has Prom and Spring Break trips. Choosing which semester to host in depends largely on your schedule (or in our case covid-19’s schedule—we are hosting two half year students this spring) but if it is just a matter of not wanting a full year then you can choose which is more important or fun to show your student.

We decided to host two half-year Spring semester students this year, our original students deferred to next year, class of 22, so we will see them then. Some countries only allow their students to go on exchange certain years of their schooling, so we decided to help those students where this would be their last chance to fulfill a dream. My husband has been an “essential” worker during all this pandemic mess and our school signed off so we can host, so why not right? We found two young ladies that look great and we get add Austria to our list countries we have hosted from, the other girl is from Italy (it seems we like the Italian culture and being shamed for our Italian restaurants haha).

So how are we going to fit a year of experience, because that is what we are used to, into one semester? We will get Christmas with at least one of them because of her school requirements, so that’s Christmas. I was thinking about doing a fake-Thanksgiving in February or March. Because January will be busy getting into the hang out things and school stuff. Then April is spring break and we generally like to go somewhere for that. Then this year May is graduation, and I hope prom is somewhere in there. So yeah, we will do a fake-Thanksgiving somewhere in there. Halloween would be too hard to replicate, maybe we can find something, even if it is just a ghost tour.

The weird thing for us will be usually by second semester we know our students pretty well and we have ironed out most of the problems, this time we will just be getting started. This will be a new experience for us, a new adventure. I mean, all new students bring their own new adventures but I think this will be very much different. Half-year students in the time of corona. Hopefully we will be able to do stuff. Hell, hopefully we will have a spring exchange program.

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