Sunburned Essays and the Road to Germany

A few days ago, CIEE had a webinar for high school students going on the CBYX program. It was run by our usual CIEE team (the people we’ve been communicating with since semifinalist notifications). But at the webinar, our program coordinators announced that in just a few weeks, they won’t be the ones regularly working with us. Instead, most of our work will be with people from the implementing organizations (the groups that run CBYX on the German side). The reason? It’s time for folks from CIEE to prepare for a new round of applicants! The idea left me stunned – had it really been so long since first applying?

The road to Germany began walking down the hall with friends, having just left Chemistry class. At 2:30 in the afternoon, the heat is sweltering. In September, Florida is still a few months away from cooling down; we also have outdoor school plans with open-air hallways. I break away to head to Yearbook when a ping hits my phone. Looking down, I see that it’s a message from my guidance counselor to the freshman Google Classroom. Sun streams through gaps in the aluminum awning to illuminate the title: “Scholarship opportunity for fully funded year abroad”.

Over the course of two months, I prepared my CBYX scholarship application. Using resources meant for college admissions, I formed my essays with painstaking detail. A week before submissions were due, I had only written two and a half of the required six essays. I decided to stop overthinking my work and go all in on a simple, humorous persona: a Floridian who, finally fed up with eternal summer, wanted to experience a Christmas market. 

Three months after applying, I’m in AP Precalculus. I stare at my teacher’s messy handwriting scrawled across the board in green expo marker, then back at my homework. Groaning in frustration, I pull up the answer key my teacher provided to check our work. Scrolling through the problems, I finally find the one I’ve been working on – that’s when I get the email. I click on it, heart racing. A blue spinning wheel appears and I curse the school Wi-Fi for being slow. Once opened, my eyes dart to find the words I’ve been waiting months to see: “We were impressed with your application and… would like to offer you an in-person interview”.

Getting the semifinalist letter was a shift, a turning point where Germany became a real opportunity, rather than a distant dream. It was time to thank people who had written me letters of recommendation, as well as the counselor who first posted about the program; it was time to plan a trip to Atlanta for the in-person interviews. In the months surrounding these events I began to prepare responses to questions commonly asked by friends and family members. Topics like my reasoning for going and what activities I would be missing while abroad began to come up in conversations. And, I started to practice German online. At time of writing, that was exactly 200 days ago.

Spring break and I’m in the Florida Keys. There for the week with a group of friends, we make the most of the time off: sailing amid turquoise waters, visiting the Mile 0 marker, snorkeling through coral reefs, listening to Jimmy Buffett, and becoming connoisseurs of Key Lime pie. As we step out of a sunken treasure museum, I go to pull up directions to the Southernmost Point Buoy on my phone. All of a sudden, I get a call identified as “CBYX”. Knowing that this is the week acceptance letters are supposed to come out, my heart races. Picking up, I try to contain my excitement. “Hello?”