There are more than 20 students featured in the book, The New Global Student. Let me introduce you to a few of them....

Lang gets his head shaved as part of his preparation to spend two weeks as a novice Buddhist monk in Thailand.

Lang Van Dommelen grew up in an off-the-grid cabin in Bird Creek, Alaska.  He was homeschooled for several years and followed the Waldorf approach to education.  When he was 16, he seized an opportunity to go abroad as an exchange student.  He was thrilled that he was going to be sent to Italy, and set about studying the Italian language and culture.  But at the last minute, that plan disintegrated and he had only 24 hours to make a decision:  skip the exchange, go to Mexico or go to Thailand.  He picked Thailand--and had an amazing year during which he took advantage of every opportunity to experience the culture (see above). 

Teal during firefighter training with other Norwegian Cruise Lines crew members. 

Teal Frost (daughter #3) spent her junior year of high school on exchange in Brazil, then joined us in Argentina for what would have been her senior year.  She finished high school online and took courses at an Argentine university, then transferred as a junior to a university in Canada at age 18.  She was both an RA and a TA, and graduated at 19.  Not sure where she wanted to live but interested in traveling, saving money and perfecting her language skills, she aced two interviews (in three languages) and got a job as an events coordinator for Norwegian Cruise Lines.  She's spent the last four months working the Charleston-to-Bahamas route.  When she's not leading massive bingo games, karaoke contests, or theme parties, she participates in staff trainings that require her to put out fires (see above) and jump ship to inflate life rafts so she can save passengers from whatever may happen on the high seas. Teal has been on board for over a year now, doing the Bahamas/Bermuda run, the Mediterranean route, and is currently working the Buenos Aires/Santiago circuit before heading to her Baltic Seas assignment.

Ryan on Mount Hood.

Ryan Hastreiter spent his junior year of high school in Taiwan at a massive all-boys high school--9,000 students!  He became fluent in Mandarin, survived the SARS epidemic, returned to Oregon, took community college courses his senior year and entered the University of Oregon at 18 as a junior.  There, he fell in love with whitewater kayaking and got a job with a Taiwanese electronics company that paid him handsomely and flew him all over the place.  He quit that job to spend more time on the river as an marketing intern for a watersports retailer in Colorado.  Ryan managed to get so good at kayaking that he was sent on a Gear for Good mission to Uganda with some of the world's top kayakers.

Watch this amazing video of Ryan and his friends in Uganda  at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDbP7SVJu80

After returning from Uganda, Ryan snagged a job in the global retail projects division at Nike.  He spent a lot of time snowboarding on Mount Hood this past winter, but had un unfortunate jumping incident and managed to mangle a vertebra or two.  In true Ryan form, he used his belt to secure his head to his car's headrest and drove himself to the hospital!  He's fine now--though carrying some metal in his spine--and recognizes that his helmet-required sports days may be numbered.  Well, he's had a great run.   

Rachel at the calcium deposits in Pamukkale, Turkey at the foot of Hierapolis, an ancient ruined city.

Rachel Lewis grew up in Kamiah, Idaho, a tiny logging community in which she saw few prospects for international travel.  Thanks to her local Rotary Club, she was given a scholarship to study abroad for a year during high school. Here's an update she sent in April:

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost been 10 years since my journey from small town Idaho to Denmark for a year as an exchange student. In this time, I’ve continued my travels as much as life has permitted. I graduated from college at Washington State University with a bachelor’s in business administration and started my career at a global business risk management consulting firm in Seattle. These days, I am busy planning my wedding for July of 2009!

Culture and travel have remained very important in my life. While in college, I returned to Denmark for a few weeks to re-connect with the friends and family I gained while living there. That trip took me up to Norway where I had the chance to experience a Norwegian Christmas with the family of one of my closest friends. After college, I traveled down to Central America with a few friends. We spent five weeks at a Spanish school in Guatemala where we got 25 hours of one-on-one tutoring a week along with room and board with a local family. The best part: all of this for less than the cost of one 3-credit college course!   I spent a few more weeks traveling around the rest of Guatemala and Costa Rica. More recently, my fiancé and I traveled to Greece and Turkey where we met up with my cousin and her husband who are serving in the Peace Corps in Romania. What a rich experience!  And now, its time to start dreaming of the next great adventure.

Talya was featured in an article in The Ithacan last fall.  Photo:  Sarah Ganzhorn

Talya Frost (our youngest daughter) never went to high school in the U.S.  We moved to Mexico just after her 8th grade year, and she enrolled at a private high school in Mazatlan where she was the only foreigner.  After a year there, we decided to move to Argentina--she picked the country!  Talya spent a month in a private international high school in Buenos Aires and then recognized the advantages of "smarting out" of high school at 15.  She studied with tutors, took university courses and then enrolled as a junior at Ithaca College in New York at the age of 17.  (She never took the SAT or ACT--but she did get a nice scholarship/grant package.)  Talya graduated with a BS in December just days after she turned 19, and is happily living in Buenos Aires, where she works as a bilingual recruiting assistant for a global creative headhunting firm.

Joshua (back left in hat) and Matt "Where the Hell is Matt?" Harding (back center with glasses) and students in Seoul.

Joshua Davies started taking community college courses while still in high school (Bainbridge Island, near Seattle) and transferred to Bard College in New York.  After spending semesters in India and France, he graduated and spent some time in Prague, where he was certified to teach English.  Four years ago, at the age of 26, he got a teaching job in South Korea, and earned a master's degree from Shenandoah University via a limited residency program. Joshua has worked his way up to a sweet university teaching position--and gets five months off (PAID!) each year, allowing him to travel the world. You can learn more (and contact him for tips!) by visiting his site at joshuawdavies.com  He sent this update in January: 

Currently I'm teaching at Yonsei University in the College of English Faculty. I was recently appointed coordinator for teacher training with KOTESOL (the national affiliate of the worldwide TESOL organization), in addition to my existing role as webmaster for them.

I've also been getting involved much more in my local Toastmasters Club as I've been working on writing a university level presentation textbook for non-native English speakers and I wanted the chance to continue improving my own skills. Despite Seoul's convenient location for making forays throughout Asia, this year has brought fewer international travels (although I was in Tokyo in October to give a presentation at a teachers' conference) but many more Korean ones as my parents came to visit for a month in June. We traveled everywhere in Korea from the North Korean city of Kaesong to the East Sea volcanic island of Ulleungdo and almost everywhere in between.

Earlier in the year my students got the chance to be inspired to travel themselves when we danced with Matt Harding in front of Namdaemun gate (sadly 2 weeks before it was burned down). You can see my students and me at minute 2:47 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY) and he's also blogged about us at http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/south_korea/index.html. Matt's a great guy and a real inspiration to just get out there and do it.

Adam Young-Valdovinos (he now goes by his middle name, Christian) spent his junior year of high school on a Rotary exchange in Japan. After his senior year in Oregon, he was accepted at many top schools and picked Yale.   He spent a year on campus, then spent a year in South Korea, where he learned a lot about songwriting, was in a professional musical and even ended up getting scouted by a record label in the States.  He then attended Beijing University for a year through a Yale program and is becoming fluent in Mandarin.  He hope to continue his studies around the world with an eye toward offering his skills to be of service to his community wherever he goes.

Philip Storey took a gap year between high school in Houston and attending Vanderbilt University and went on a Rotary Exchange to Argentina. His time abroad inspired a passion for language and culture, and rather than focus solely on his planned major (biotech), he blended the science path with his new interest in travel, spending time studying in several countries and taking intensive summer sessions to get his science courses in. After graduation, he got a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to study for his master's in public health in Australia, then spent three months in Senegal to work on his French. Now, he's a student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and took a summer WHO internship in South Africa for AIDS research.

Emily with her fiancé's sisters and cousins at a family member's engagement party in India.

Emily Montgomery spent a year in Hungary on an AFS exchange, and after she returned to Texas, she figured out how to get into Wellesley without actually graduating from high school or even taking the GED! She's done quite a bit of traveling since her exchange, and there's much more ahead.   She married a young MIT student from India, moved with him to Hong Kong and is currently exploring her academic options in London.