By Jason Klaiber

Staff Writer

Over the past year, Fayetteville-Manlius High School student True Usiatynski spent time in Germany on a prestigious scholarship.

Belonging to a group of 250 Americans studying on scholarships funded bilaterally by the United States and Germany, Usiatynski was accepted to the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange program in March as the sole scholarship recipient from the Syracuse area.

She started her journey last August with about three years of experience in learning the German language.

Usiatynski landed in Frankfurt with 50 fellow scholarship recipients and an American Field Service (AFS) representative.

The students later connected with an affiliated exchange organization and lived with its members in a youth hostel for a month, learning how to better communicate in German.  

After staying at the hostel, Usiatynski began taking classes at the Stormarnschule in Ahrensburg while residing with a host family in nearby Hamburg.

She encountered difficulty adjusting at first with the pressure of traversing the language barrier, breaking into long-established friend groups and absorbing new household rules.

Her year-long trip also marked her first-ever visit to Europe.

Usiatynski nonetheless credits her time in Germany with fostering in her a heightened sense of independence.

“I had to figure out how to use public transportation in a big city, which is something I never had to do,” Usiatynski said. “I had to buy my own toothpaste.”

The only American student assigned to her specific school, she found relief in the fact that many of her German classmates spoke fluent English.

“Germans are amazingly good at foreign languages,” Usiatynski said. “It was really helpful that they could understand English.”

She still, however, spoke with her host family almost exclusively in German while also taking notes, completing homework and reading her textbooks in German.

During Usiatynski’s year of study, she spent her free time horseback riding, rock climbing, sailing and visiting street festivals with newfound friends while exploring cities like Berlin and other countries like Italy. She also blogged about her daily activities.

Usiatynski said she was warned before heading to Germany that the residents there had cold personalities, an assumption she said proved false.

“People are people,” she said. “Everyone gives you all these warnings and you don’t necessarily need to make a judgment based on that.”

Usiatynski said she experienced a bit of culture shock upon returning to Fayetteville earlier this month, mainly because the water wasn’t sparkling like it commonly was in Germany and everyone around her spoke English again.

Now going into her junior year of high school, she plans to continue taking German classes at Fayetteville-Manlius and one at Onondaga Community College.