Applications and interviews and decisions - oh my!

Essentially, I am your average American teenager with an incredibly short attention span who is never satisfied with what she has (this is not precisely true), and I’m looking for a new adventure via an exchange for the 2010-2011 school year (this is). I have applications in for the CBYX scholarship to go to Germany and the NSLI-Y scholarship to go to basically wherever they want to send me (hoping for Turkey at the moment), but these are both highly competitive programs. I have an interview for NSLI-Y this Sunday and the selection committee for CBYX at the end of the month, so if anyone happens upon this blog before then, direct positive thoughts toward me, would ya? In a perfect world, I’ll be offered at least one of those scholarships and scamper off happily to my exciting life in country x sometime next summer or fall. Of course, I’m competing against thousands of other students – most of whom are incredibly motivated, intelligent, and well-rounded people – for a relatively small number of spots. (Speaking of motivation, I bet most of them are doing homework right now instead of fantasizing about their exchanges. Oops.) So if those two don’t work out (how I hope and I pray that they will, but today I am still…just a bill?), I’ll probably end up shelling out my life’s savings for a normal AFS exchange program to a Spanish-speaking country — after all, I have been studying Spanish for about five years now, so if I do end up needing to fund my own trip, I might as well put that amazing public school education to good use…
Seriously, though, I do love Spanish, so while Germany is my first choice because I love it there and Turkey/Russia/India/South Korea/China/Jordan/Egypt (mostly Turkey) come second because they also sound incredible, the only reason I’d be disappointed to end up in South America is the lack of a full scholarship.

So, that’s pretty much where I stand right now. I’ll probably forget about this for a while, so farewell sweet blog. We’ll meet again when I have some sort of clue regarding my plans for next year. Or in a few days. You just never know with these things.

(via Wordpress: We Had Longer Ways To Go, 3 Feb 2010.)