Onyx Fall-Winter 2016

across Europe and spending time with her host family. During her ten- month stay she lived with two different families; each of which had children of their own. While she was there, she celebrated traditional holidays including her birthday and Christmas. Mace says missing the holidays at home wasn’t as tough as she expected, and she even had the chance to Skype with her family during her grandfather’s 92nd birthday party. Although she wasn’t home during the holidays, that doesn’t mean she didn’t feel pangs of homesickness from time to time. But as she lists each of the countries she visited and the many adventures she had over the time she was gone, Mace says the sacrifice was worth it. For two weeks Mace and the other students in her exchange program visited France, Italy and Spain. She also gained passport stamps from Budapest, London, Poland, Prague, and Vienna. The many countries she visited and cultures she learned about will no doubt help in her future career in International Business. As a freshman at The Woods, Mace says her goals for the future are not completely figured out just yet, but her travels have certainly inspired her career aspirations.

“Right now I would love to go into international law or a nonprofit,” she says. “I would love to help people that don’t have the resources to help themselves. When I was in India, I thought there is so much good that I could do. Through my career I want to help people in the future.” Only here for a couple of months, Mace is already helping people, including her fellow students at The Woods. During the Labor Day holiday, the first long weekend off of classes for the new academic year, Mace says she stayed on campus instead of going home. While on campus, she spent time with many of the international students who couldn’t travel home. She spent time learning about their hometowns and making each of the students feel welcome in their new home. Mace says she was just paying it forward, after so many people did the same for her last year. She says it just one of the many lessons she learned during the memorable year. “It was for sure the most memorable year of my life so far,” Mace says. “I don’t want to say it’s the best year of my entire life because I hope it only goes up from here.”

to buck it up, ‘You’ll be home in July’. That was a wakeup call to me. I am one of the first people from my friends and family to study abroad. I wanted to be a success.” As a student, Mace attended the Gymnasium Trebišovská, the equivalent of a US high school. The bilingual class she was in consisted of students from all over the world who took traditional high school classes. With only a few classes taught in English, Mace was certainly tested on not only the course material, but her skills in learning and translating Slovak, the national language in Slovakia. It may have taken a little bit of time, but Mace soon found herself excelling in her studies, traveling across Europe and speaking conversationally with her host family and new friends. “I took the approach, I’m here. I need to make it work,” she explains. “The teachers were very understanding. A lot of the work wasn’t based on the grades, it was based my scores on scale of 1-5 participation. They understood that we weren’t going to know it all; no one expected me to know the whole periodic table in Slovak.” When she wasn’t in classes, Mace made the most of her time; traveling

1. Eighty exchange students from 18 different countries attended the same district as Mannah. She is in front, on the far right, with the American flag. 2. Mannah standing in front the St. Elizabeth Church in Kosice, Slovakia. This is the largest church in Slovakia. 3. Mannah and her class traveled to London and spent five days sightseeing.

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