Comment by throawa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throawa | Hacker News Reader

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Overall I agree, it was a positive program, although with its own quirks and downsides. That said, my "issues" with it are:

- That "task" was never clearly spelled out to mostly immature, 16 year old minors. The attached strings were slowly revealed much later into the deal. I don't want to call it a "bait-and-switch", but it does have many attributes of it.

- There's no way to repay the State Dept for the expenses if you don't want to "do the 2 years".

- As I already mentioned earlier, communications mechanisms were revolutionized since then with the advance of Internet. Most communication and spread of informal knowledge now occurs online, even in my home country. Most ideological "debates" over Western ideals, etc., happen online.

- I wonder what the failure rate was for the program. Most people I know either came back to the US immediately, or eventually. I believe the program is shut down now. Unfortunately, a failed program to a government official is just that -- oh well, time to move on. To a participant, it's a life-altering experience, for better or worse.

Very good points. Yeah at no point in the process did they make that explicit, and that is unfortunate.

And completely agree, someone should have the option to basically repay all the expenses associated with the 2 years and get a waiver in return. Heck, you have probably already repaid it many times over just by paying taxes and producing value in this country.

Looking back at my experience I did actually do some of the sharing. I was only 15 at the time and so I had 2 more years of high-school before heading back to US for the University (also a full ride scholarship). There were a number of times when teachers from my high-school back home invited me in for a round table discussion so I could share some of the teaching practices from American high-school. For example I told them about how frequent quizzes and tests are used to make grading more objective and it keeps tracks of students' progress. Or how group and research projects are used. At least in that one high-school some teachers chose to implement that. I encouraged my extended family members to study English (2 of my younger cousins followed in my footsteps). Also remember tutoring some classmates in English and telling them about American culture informally. I would like to think I made some contribution at least.

Yeah you made a good point about how Internet sort of made this obsolete. I agree 90%, the other 10% are reserved for the case when actually meeting someone who have been abroad and has acquired some of the culture and ideas is still different than reading it from a magazine or seeing it online.

Ha, I should have realized you were an insider. :) Your timing was much luckier, since you had those 2 years built-in, although I'm not sure whether you got to skip a grade when you came back, or had to "downgrade" and sit those two years with lowerclassmen, while your classmates remained a grade ahead. That would have sucked.

Anyway, the fact that you also went back to the US after graduating validates my last point -- yet another "future leader" failed the "task". ;)

> or had to "downgrade" and sit those two years with lowerclassmen

Good guess! Yap had to to that. But it was a fun time. I already knew all the material and didn't really have to work. Had more time to hack on my computer which is what I really wanted to do.

> yet another "future leader" failed the "task". ;)

True. Not much of a future leader more of a introverted nerd who likes to code. It worked out great for me though.

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