
This could sometimes prove challenging since, as she remembered, “not a lot of people knew what or where Belgium was!” So how did Teresa introduce her fellow program participants to Belgium? “I talked about what we are good at, like making chocolate and beer, but also our football team. I also liked working in groups because everybody had something interesting to bring to the table.”Īs the only Belgian student in her program, Teresa served as a cultural ambassador of her country. I enjoyed working on this project because we got to be creative and original. “In the Presentation & Communication Skills class, we had to form groups of three and come up with a new, unique, and realistic product or service that we would have to present in front of the class.
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I participated in class discussions, college workshops about the US education system, admission requirements, and about how to choose a college major.” Teresa explained: “I attended morning Academic & Writing Skills (A&W) class and an afternoon Presentation & Communication Skills (P&C) class. Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games: EducationUSA Academy students kept busy inside the classroom too. In addition to living with local families in homestays, their immersive experience included typical teenage activities: shopping at a local mall, spending a day at a theme park, and watching a baseball game. This camping trip allowed us to grow closer as a group.”ĭuring the four-week program, students also biked across the Golden Gate Bridge, visited a local tech company, and toured Alcatraz. (…) Since we were always together, you would talk to people you had never really conversed with. At the end of each day, we would all sit around the campfire and tell scary stories.
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“There was no WiFi or TV so we had to entertain ourselves. Personally, that was one of the highlights of the program,” Teresa remembered. “On the second week of the Academy, we went camping for three days in Yosemite National Park. Its location in the San Francisco Bay area provided opportunities for Teresa and her fellow program participants to visit the campuses of UC Berkeley, the California Academy of Science, University of San Francisco, and Stanford University, and to see some of the United States’ most renowned landmarks. “It has a big campus and is well renowned for transferring its students to UC (University of California) colleges such as UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, and more.”ĭiablo Valley College is currently the only community college that hosts an EducationUSA Academy program - and the only campus on the West Coast.


“Diablo Valley College is a community college in Concord, California,” she explained to our EducationUSA Adviser. Now, however, she’s an expert on what sets DVC apart. As an EducationUSA Academy Scholar, Teresa spent four weeks in July and August attending intensive language and college prep classes at the EducationUSA Academy at Diablo Valley College.īefore applying to the EducationUSA Academy scholarship, Teresa had never heard of Diablo Valley College. Not so for Teresa Duru-Onweni, a sixteen-year-old Belgian student from Aalst who received the 2019 EducationUSA Academy Scholarship to attend a college preparatory program in the United States. Time to recover from final exams, to unplug from high school drama, and maybe to work a student job or take a family holiday. For high school students in Belgium and across the world, summer means vacation.
