For many Riverside students, the hallways, people, and culture of the school are nothing new, familiar experiences to every teenager. But for a few students here it’s completely novel, not to mention thousands of miles away from the schools they’ve known from home.
Luis Bloch, an exchange student from Brazil, comes from a school with only around 400 people.
Luis said that the language was a big adjustment for him, but something he got used to after a while.
“The first week [in the US] I was tired of English,” he said, “but now I’m used to it.”
Faye Kaniuth is another student from Germany. She’s staying for the year as a junior after she decided with her parents to visit as an exchange student. She also mentioned the switch to speaking English.
“I thought I would have more problems with the language,” said Faye, “but I feel like it’s going okay.”
Another adjustment was cultural differences. Americans do things differently from their home countries, and everything from regular conversations, to school systems, to in and out of school activities took some getting used to.
“A thing that’s very common here is like small talk with strangers,” Said Faye, “a cashier will ask you how you are or how you like everything and that is so weird to me. A stranger [in Germany] would never ask you how your day is.”
Extracurricular activities are also much more popular here than in their home countries.
Saad Moroini, another student from Morocco who is here for his senior year to earn a scholarship, mentioned the school’s emphasis on sports and clubs.
“It is very different,” he said, “There’s a lot more activities here, where schools back home are more focused on just studying.” “But here, there’s clubs, there’s sports, and they’re taking it very seriously.”
Even though Luis is only staying at the school for one semester and missed the season’s tryouts, he’s joined the varsity soccer team and scored six goals already.
“I played in a club [in Brazil] that I stopped, and now I play soccer here again,” he said. “Soccer for me is the best part because our team became like a family.”
As for schoolwork itself, Faye, Luis, and Saad all agreed that school in America was actually easier than school abroad.
“You have way more time to do stuff here, so it’s kind of slower,” said Faye. “I feel like the exam, since you have a lot of multiple choice here, and we don’t have multiple choice at all, I think it’s a bit more difficult in Germany.”
The students also described how differently school is handled here from their home countries.
“It was fairly easy, to be honest,” Saad said. “To think of a difficulty, it probably was the assignments, because I’m not used to having a lot of assignments. [In Morocco] We would just have a test, and that’s the only thing that makes up your grade.”
Luis’ school in Brazil didn’t have many students and students stayed in the same classroom all day.
“We don’t change the classrooms, so we stayed in the same classroom the whole year and the teachers moved. I have four classes a day. So teachers move [for] four [subjects].”
Faye, Luis and Saad all decided to study abroad, but for different reasons.
Saad wants to go to college in the US.
“I want to try to apply for a scholarship to come back here,” he said, “maybe [to study] computer science or cyber security. That’s what I’m most interested in.”
Luis and Faye were simply curious about what high school in America was like, and seized the opportunity to experience it first-hand. “I had a lot of friends that went here who did the exchange program,” said Luis. “They were saying ‘oh it’s so nice you have to do it,’ then I started wanting to, and now I’m here.”
