Photo by Erin Nelson.
Ayden Yother, a rising sophomore at Vestavia Hills High School, is one of 250 high school students from across the United States to be selected as a 2023-24 recipient of the prestigious Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Scholarship and will spend her sophomore year studying in Germany.
Ayden Yother, a 10th grade student at Vestavia Hills High School, has been chosen as one of 250 high school students across the country to study abroad through a prestigious foreign exchange program.
Yother, 15, will spend the 2023-24 school year in Germany through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Scholarship, which was initiated in 1983 to “strengthen ties between Germany and the United States,” according to a press release.
Yother leaves Aug. 6 and will live with a host family and attend a German high school for a year. For the first three weeks, she will be going through an intensive language camp before going to her host family. Her results on the exam will determine which level of school she will go to, she said.
“I’ve always been interested in other cultures,” Yother said. “I’m excited to experience a different culture than what I’m used to in Vestavia.”
Yother’s great-grandmother was a “war brat” after World War II, said Yother’s mom, Jessica. The family still has distant relatives in Germany. Jessica recalled her grandmother hiding her German heritage when she moved to the United States. She had served as a translator for the Americans after the war ended, and in the process met her future husband.
Knowing her family’s history spurred Yother to study German, which she’s done for three years.
“I just fell in love with the language,” she said.
Vestavia has helped prepare her for the journey, she said.
“There’s a lot of opportunities and the school is very advanced,” Yother said.
German isn’t all that hard, either, Yother said.
“You just have to work a little bit and it all comes together,” she said.
Yother said she also loves learning about cultural differences. She’ll be able to be more independent in Germany and walk to different places, along with meeting other exchange students and her host family.
While she admitted she is “pretty nervous,” she also said she felt “pretty prepared” as well. Packing bags always makes her excited, Yother said, and this trip is no exception.
“It makes everything a lot more real,” she said.
Attending school in a different language will help her develop an ethic for hard work, Yother said. She said she wants to pursue engineering or possibly linguistics in the future.
“Having the experience of a different culture gives you a different viewpoint,” she said.
Yother’s dad, Ben, said knowing she will be in Germany during the school year brings about mixed feelings, but the “most prominent” is pride.
“She found this on her own, took it on her own,” he said. “She’s always had a go-getter attitude.”
Typically, the program only accepts junior and senior students, so the Yothers did not expect her to get in but were excited when she did, he said.
“We knew she was a great student,” Ben said.
Yother’s mother said it’s been great to be able to celebrate with her and get a feel for what it will be like when she goes to Germany.
Yother will return to the United States next June.
