“I live in a very small town,” says Reed High Italian exchange student Camilla Sciarinno.“There are 1,000 people, so all the people know each other.”
The 16-year-old just made the move from Lozza, a miniature town just north of Milan, Italy, to a host family home in Sparks. Sciarinno grew up in Lozza with her mother, father, and younger sister.
“I like it because my friends are the same since kindergarten,” Sciarinno said. “But sometimes it’s okay, we grow out in different ways. You have to find new places.”
She applied to an agency for foreign exchange programs, going through extensive paperwork and documents which would help them get a feel for who she was and where she wanted to go. She completed four parts of a test, which consisted of oral, written, listening, and psychological sections. Sciarinno found the psychology test to be strange.
“The first question she asked me was, are you ready to return with more weight?” she remembers.
Young students wanting to study abroad can reach out to education companies, such as EF Education First, and apply to different high schools in the U.S. They are assigned to stay with a host family for a year, traveling with a J-1 visa.
The U.S. has a multitude of organizations which offer study abroad programs for American high school students as well, not just college, including opportunities for shorter trips that are similar to Sciarinno’s, in which students stay with a family for an extended period of time and attend a local high school.
Sciarinno was set up with a partnering organization in Nevada to help complete the process, where a family would choose to take her into their home for a year. When Sciarinno got off her plane, she was warmly greeted by the Murphey family with a big welcome sign.
Now, she spends her weekends going to different outings with them, teaching them a little bit of Italian here and there. She makes a point to not message her family back home every day, which would distract her from her new routine in Reno/Sparks.
“It’s like a rule of the agency, that it’s better not to write every day because you have to make your life here.”
This is the first time Sciarinno has been away from her family for more than two weeks. When they send her photos, it hits her again just how much she misses them, especially her 14-year-old sister.
“I think she’s one of the people I miss more,” Sciarinno said.
In Italy, there are many different types of high schools you can attend depending on what you might want to focus on.
Sciarinno decided to focus on social studies, although it separated her from her friends. In high school, you stay with the same classmates for all your years, and every day the subjects change and the teachers shift around.
At Reed High School, the schedule was much stranger to Sciarinno, who was used to being around the same people at school.
“It’s not that easy to make friends if every hour you have to change classmates, change your class,” Sciarinno explained.
Despite this, she says classmates around her here are friendly and curious.
A lot of people question Sciarinno on her choice to come here to study for a year, and she is quite confident in her decision to get out of her own little world.
“Why do I have to stay in Italy when I can go on the other side of the world, discover new places, new people,” Sciarinno said. “The world is not in Italy, [it’s] not in my small town.”