Introduction & Application Process

Hello! This post is actually a bit belated, but better late than never.

Apologies for those of you who expected a good introduction, because that is not my strong suit.

My name is Ashley! I am 20 years old, and I hail from northern Virginia. I attend Kenyon College in Ohio, a small school which consists of approximately 1,600 students, where I am a Japanese major. I will be studying abroad in Tokyo, Japan from September 15th, 2016 to July 31st, 2017. I am going through the CIEE Tokyo Arts and Sciences program, and will be studying at Sophia University, a small school (relatively speaking--there are about 13,000 students!) in the center of the city.

There is not actually a whole lot for me to say about myself, so instead I'll talk a bit about the application process, for those who may be interested.

The process for applying can vary considerably depending on what school you attend, but for mine, I had to write not one, but two applications. The first was an application to get permission from my school to do the actual study abroad application for CIEE (or whichever program you choose to do). That was tedious, but the entire process only lasted maybe 2-3 months (I believe November through January, plus 2 mandatory meetings later on for good measure).

The CIEE application, on the other hand...

Well, if you are not a patient person, you will not enjoy this process.

I assume that it is roughly the same amount of time for any study abroad program--rightfully so, considering how much goes into making sure everything goes smoothly--but it is still absolutely agonizing to wait for such an important decision.

I started the application in early February and received my CIEE acceptance in late February. It's worth noting that the CIEE acceptance just means that they think that Sophia University will probably accept you--it's not a guarantee yet. The Sophia acceptance came in late May. The CIEE acceptance came in the form of a phone call--perhaps the most exciting phone call of my life--and the Sophia acceptance came via email. In essence, from beginning to "end" I spent about 7 months waiting for that final response.

Above is the list of most of what I had to do for CIEE (you might have noticed that even after getting accepted, there are more forms to fill out). Most of it is pretty easy, and if you have any questions at all, the people there are extremely helpful and will usually answer you within a day or two. As an easily stressed out person, I appreciated how willing they were to help me whenever I wasn't sure about something. Their willingness to help guide you through the process--which they continue to do while you're actually studying abroad--is a big part of what helped me make my decision to study with them. It also had the added bonus of making my parents worry that much less, since I'm not just being thrown into a foreign country and left to figure it all out on my own.

A lot of other basic information can be found on the program website that I linked to near the beginning of this post. If anyone in the future stumbles upon this blog and has any questions, feel free to comment. I'm pretty sure that I will get email notifications, so I will try to answer as soon as I can.

Hopefully I can keep up with this blog for the entire year, and hopefully it will be of some use to you!