While the back-to-school season is rough for a lot of students, Dominika Mendelova might have a more difficult transition than a lot of her peers, since she is over 7,000 kilometres away from home.
The 17-year-old hails from Martin, Slovakia and will be attending R.D. Parker Collegiate throughout the next 10 months as part of the Rotary Club of Thompson’s student exchange program.
Mendelova is taking the place of RDPC graduate Anthony Hanson, who is in the middle of his own year-long exchange in Norway.
Even though Mendelova wasn’t given a choice of where she would end up in North America, the Grade 12 student still hoped she would be placed in Canada as opposed to the United States.
“The USA has all those guns and the shootings which makes you not want to go there,” she said.
After arriving in mid-August, Mendelova has been slowly adjusting to life in Thompson, and recently told the Nickel Belt News that she’s already noticed a distinct difference in the way people behave compared to back home.
“People are more open-minded here,” she said on Sept. 14. “People in Slovakia usually mind their own business. They don’t really care about other people and so far the people I’ve met here they are super nice and polite.“
In this spirit, Mendelova has already joined the high school activist group Hands, Hearts, and Hope (H3), an organization that is known for collecting supplies for the food bank and spearheading initiatives like a free lunch program for their fellow students.
Mendelova also said that the school curriculum in Manitoba is a lot less rigid compared to what she is used to, which has allowed her to pursue topics like psychology that normally get pushed to the side in Slovakia.
“Even though I know I don’t want to do anything in the future with chemistry I have to take this class for seven years,” she said, describing her curriculum back home.
While Mendelova won’t officially graduate until she is 20 years old, since high school in Slovakia can extend to Grade 15, she’s already thinking about incorporating the program’s emphasis on travel and cultural exchange into her post-secondary career.
“I would like to do something with diplomacy. I would like to work in an embassy in some other country,” she said. “The good thing is that when you work at an embassy every four years you move to some different country … but that’s a long time. I still have three years to decide where I actually want to go.”
Over the rest of the school year, Mendelova said she wants to take everything slow, since Northern Manitoba is still relatively new to her.
However, according to Rotary Club of Thompson president Cristin Smook, the best way to move forward for any exchange student is to embrace every new opportunity that presents itself.
“I was an exchange student in the same program as them when I was 18, so my advice to them would be to do as much as they possibly can,” she said. “I still to this day will tell people that it’s one of the best things I ever decided to do.”
As part of this program, Mendelova will be making a presentation to the Rotary Club of Thompson sometime before Christmas in order to tell its members all about her experience up to that point.
