Not every student would voluntarily give up a year of their high school experience to live in a country where they had never been with people they had never met.
However, for Mountain View High School senior Presley Stevenson, one of the hardest parts of spending her entire junior year in Italy was returning to the United States.
“It was harder to leave there than to leave here,” she recalls. “I did not anticipate that at all. I left a piece of me in Italy.”
Presley, who started school at Mountain View in ninth grade, was never particularly unhappy with how things were going for her in high school. However, as her time in school went by, she felt like something was missing. After learning about Interact, the high school version of Rotary Club, Presley decided she wanted to get involved. Through Interact, she learned about Rotary’s student exchange program and started to think it was a good fit for her.
“I felt very stuck in a way. Things were going how I had always planned them to go, but I wasn’t feeling satisfaction,” she says. “I thought, there must be something more.”
Presley started researching how the exchange program worked, and when she felt she had enough information, she approached her parents with her idea.
“They were iffy about it, but I knew that if I went to them educated and prepared, they’d be much more willing to say yes,” she says. “I had a mindset that I wanted to see something outside of Loveland.”
After convincing her parents that her plan was solid (and promising them she would learn a second language as part of the deal), Presley spent her sophomore year preparing for her year abroad.
Presley Stevenson Learns Through Living and Connecting With Others
At the beginning of her junior year, she moved to the Northwest coast of Italy, where she lived with two different host families and attended the local school. No one around her, including her host families, spoke English, and she was immediately fully immersed in Italian culture.
“I think every person should live in a culture that is different from their own. It’s so good to see different points of view,” she says. “Being in another country breaks down your preconceptions and stereotypes, whether you knew they were there or not.”
Presley says that in her year living in the Italian countryside, she grew to love the Italian way of life, which is slower-paced and focused on the present.
She also learned a lot about herself, including deciding that she wants to make international journalism or policy her career, as opposed to medicine or science, as she once thought. She is planning to go to Long Island University’s Global College, which will allow her to live in a different country every semester, including Costa Rica, France, Australia, and Fiji, just to name a few.
“There’s a lot of change that needs to get made internationally,” Presley says. “If we work together, there’s so much more we can achieve than if we just focus on our own little corner. It’s time we break the cycle and learn from each other.”
Portrait of a Graduate
Collaborator
Takes actions that respect the needs and contributions of others
