My Boarding Experience

My Boarding Experience

I am spending my year in Wisconsin at the Northland Scholars Academy in Dunbar.

At first, when They told me that I’ll going to a boarding school, I was a bit scared because I always dreamed of having my experience with an Host family. When I arrived here, however, I immediately found myself very well, both with people and with managing everything, because yes, this experience teaches you to manage yourself, to become more responsible because you cannot rely on two parents but it helps you a lot to to grow up. I admit that at first I had a few moments of homesick that are very normal and disappeared with The acclimatization.

In the dormitory we are always together, in this school we are not many, but this is good because I immediately made friends with everyone. We have times to respect but they are very right times because we have to be in the female dormitory (for us females) and male (for males) at 9.30; however you can stay in the rooms of whoever you want until 10.30. We stay in the common room all together until 9.30 and play lots of games that I didn’t even know existed before coming here. Then we go up to the dormitory and we all find ourselves in someone room at 10.30. I immediately made friend with the girls and then with the boys, now we are like a big family; even the managers of the dormitory are a bit like parents to us because they are there for everything and they often join us for games.

Here the school is completely different from the Italian one, everyone says that the simplest but in my opinion it is not so, it seems simpler because you live it with less stress and without worries. Even teachers are more friends than professors and they don’t give you that fear that you have with almost everyone in Italy. The subjects here are very beautiful because being able to choose them, you evaluate everything based on your interests. I tried to take subjects that I also needed in Italy such as Spanish which is my favorite subject here. I have other subjects like culture & languages which is very interesting, in which we are learning to say the basic phrases of all the languages of the students in the class (eg how are you ?, what’s your name?).

My school is very large in terms of environments: it has lots of green spaces and lots of buildings like the gym and two buildings for lessons. There is a café, a shop and basketball courts scattered around the campus but the highlight is the lake that is right in the middle of the college.
In this lake you can do many activities such as canoeing or ice skating in winter. The campus is surrounded by a forest, in fact they take us for anything with the school bus.

The COVID situation here is very calm because all the students live here and therefore no one enters or leaves; even the teachers have houses on campus and therefore we always go to school in the presence and we never have to wear the mask, I think this is a fantastic thing. Over the weekend we do many different activities: two weekends ago we went to the corn maze, a maze in the wheat and it was so much fun. Another weekend was that of halloween in which they organized a very elegant dinner, the dining room was decorated in a luxury restaurant style and that was dinner with murder. Then they made us do the live Cluedo in the school, the rules were the same as the boxed game only it was played with real people and environments. We really enjoyed ourselves and everything was studied in detail.The weekend after we had a bonfire where we cooked s’mores and saw a movie under the stars.For the next weekend they have organized the viewing of a Broadway Musical in which, before the visit, they take us shopping in an outlet … I can’t wait !!!
At the moment after school I still don’t do anything because when I arrived I was finishing the semester and next week the new clubs and sports start, most likely I will be doing volleyball.
The biggest surprise for me was to find so many people coming from many parts of the world because here we are 25 students in total and they all come from different however; there are 3 Americans but this does not affect the English empress at all, because in any case we have to speak English among us and being people who have been coming here for years, they know it very well; it’s a good thing because I’m learning so much about the cultures of different countries. Another big surprise was the fact that every Thursday they divide us into groups and we go to dinner with a professor, we change house every week. I like it a lot because it’s a way to talk and make friends with people. In these evenings you have a lot of fun. In the canteen here you eat quite well and healthy, in fact I am happy about this because I was afraid of gaining a lot of weight. The only flaw is that you dine very early: at 6 !!

I am really happy that despite the situation in Italy she managed to leave and I have not regretted going to a Boarding School rather than with my family because it turns out to be a truly wonderful experience.