Hello!
My name is Ryan Cobb and I will be spending my next year of high school as a junior in Germany. I am a quirky, derpy piano AP nerd who enjoys everything from running cross country to embracing in German folk dancing.
Purpose
This blog's purpose is to document my experience abroad and to share my experiences with my family and friends in America. I plan on sharing photos from my year in Germany along with several anecdotes and accounts of what it is like to be an international student. I hope also to provide advice and assistance for anyone else who has the aspirations to study abroad either in college or with the scholarship that I won and will be describing in the next section.
CBYX
In early January, I applied for a scholarship from the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, an organization created in 1986 in order to facilitate friendly relations between the United States and Germany and to educate the nations with foreign cultural values. Winners of the scholarship receive a (most-expenses-paid) year of education in a German high school in (guess what country...) DEUTSCHLAND! Every year, 250 American students and 300 German high school students receive the scholarship and spend a year of school abroad staying with a host family. The United States is divided into five regions, in which fifty people receive the scholarship. I am from the Southeast and was awarded the scholarship after an interview process by an organization called CIEE.
Plans
On August 8th, 2013, I will arrive in Washington, D.C. to meet with my other scholarship winners. On August 10th, my forty-nine CIEE buddies will fly with me to Europe and spend three weeks with me in a German cultural immersion camp. Soon after, I will begin my life as a German student and will travel to live with my host family and go to a high school in which all classes are taught in (guess what language...) DEUTSCH! I will spend ten months there and I will return to the United States in June of 2014, hopefully after a healthy dosage of rooting on the Germans to a FIFA victory in Brasil.
