Packing up your belongings, getting on a flight to a new country, and starting your first day at a new school are feelings that Stella Kim ‘27, Angela Choi ‘27, and Ellora Natarajan ‘26 experienced this year. These students from Germany, South Korea and the United Kingdom (respectively) are looking to foster community connections.

Kim, Choi, and Natarajan did not go to international school in their home countries. All three students have said the way in which teachers approach teaching in general is different in the states. 

“I went to a standard German school, not an international school so all of the classes were taught in German,” said Kim. “My old school was very different from here because of how the school system is wired. They were mainly focused on getting through the materials that they were given, because in Germany you get like a set plan for the year of what you have to teach your students, so they were very focused on getting through that instead of making sure their students understood it.”

The structure of schools abroad is not the same as that of Greenhills due to how each government chooses to build its education system. 

“The class sizes are smaller [at Greenhills] for one thing, and there’s a lot more focus on each individual student rather than the whole class which I think is better,” said Natarajan.

Teachers Luke Walker and Tim Wilson have both taught abroad at international schools in the past. 

“Teaching at an international school at a place like Taipei American for the last several years you encounter students who are very worldly,” said Walker. “They are students who have lived in a number of different places and they often don’t say they belong to one particular culture but to several. We call them third culture kids. Inherently it brings a lot of challenges but also a lot of rewards and a lot of interesting conversations to the classroom.”

Wilson taught at the Dulwich College in Shanghai. He said challenges teaching abroad were few due to the amount of help he was able to receive from his community abroad.

“There were some types of frustrations that just came naturally while living in a different country but there was a really strong community from my school that was willing to help,” said Wilson. “We also very rarely had kids that weren’t coming to us with English speaking experience.”

Choi speaks four languages including English. Her first language is Korean.

“My second language is English, which I’ve been using for about two years now,” said Choi. “I also learn Spanish in school, and I speak a little bit of Japanese. When I first moved here, I used to think in Korean but now it has all pretty much combined in my head.”

Kim was raised bilingual in English and German. She said that she sometimes faces challenges with translating information in her head from German to English, but the teachers here have been very accommodating to her academic needs.

“In Latin I have to translate everything from Latin to German and then to English,” said Kim. “It’s really crazy, but I have to do this because of how the pronunciation here works as well as how the cases are set up, so I’m constantly just translating in my head.”

Coincidentally, Kim, Natarajan, and Choi are all now members of the girls swim team.

“It was my first experience doing sports because we never did them in the UK, so it was extremely difficult for me,” said Natarajan. “The first few weeks were totally brutal and it took me a while before I could really properly complete an entire practice. But now with the new friends I have made on the team, practice is not quite so bad.”

Other than the swim team, Kim and Choi have found other commonalities with each other. Kim said it has been very helpful to find someone like herself to help her adjust better to this new place.

“When we first met I found out that she was also a new student in the sophomore class,” said Kim. “Then it just kept on getting creepier because I found that she was Korean and lives in the same apartment complex as me. Since we are neighbors, we do a lot of things together like share a ride to school everyday together, and are on the swim team together too. It’s all a very funny coincidence.”

Greenhills offers opportunities that did not exist at some of the students’ prior schools. Students are able to participate in sports and clubs that were not available to them before.

“I feel like you have more freedom; you can do a bit more of what you actually want to do and what you are interested in,” said Choi.