Foreign Affairs: Senior Harper McKee pursues his dream to study abroad as an exchange student in Denmark this semester

Touching down after a ten hour flight, senior Harper McKee couldn’t help but be excited despite the jetlag.

After months of reviewing five different programs and filling out countless forms, McKee was finally accepted to the Council of International Educational Exchange semester abroad program in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“I was inspired when I became really good friends with [senior] Isaline [Chapuzet], who was a French exchange student last year,” McKee said. “[East alum] Poppy Billingsley, who used the same program when she traveled to Ireland last year, helped a lot with the specifics of a semester abroad.”

McKee traveled to Copenhagen in early August along with six other exchange students from CIEE, all preparing to exchange at schools located throughout Denmark, spending the first few days of their trip in the program’s office building.

“We stayed in the CIEE main building for three days, getting used to the culture and getting rid of the jetlag,” McKee said. “Just reviewing the company’s policy and the procedure for all the other students before we met our host families.”

McKee’s host family, the Rasmussens, went to pick him up on the first official day of the program. McKee was grateful for their help while he adjusted to life in Denmark before school started.

“They’re super nice, I love them a lot,” McKee said. “They’ve taken me around and tried to introduce me to all the Danish customs. They have a daughter, Victoria, who is 15, but she is doing a semester abroad in [Oregon] right now, so I kinda flipped places with her.”

When McKee finally introduced himself to his classmates, he was surprised with how little they knew about each other’s cultures.

“It’s funny because people ask me where I’m from, and I’m like, ‘I’m from the United States.’ And they’re like, ‘What state?’” Mckee said. “I expected they’ve heard of like California or New York or Florida, but when they hear Kansas — they’re like: ‘Is that one of the southern ones?’”

Though he had help, he realized it wasn’t all that easy to have a normal experience at school, especially considering he doesn’t even speak Danish, the national language.

“I’m not even close to fluent, and I’m still struggling to not talk mainly in English,” McKee said. “In most lectures at school, I have to hear the native speakers, so I basically don’t understand a word of it.”

Mitigating most of these problems with Google Translate and talking to his teachers after class has helped him in school. However, the language barrier also impacted McKee’s social life with his new friends.

“When I’m having conversations with my group of friends. I mean, if it’s not directly to me, I miss a lot of [the Danish],” McKee said. “I’m getting better while I pick things up and they’re teaching me a little, but not to a point where I can have full conversations.”

McKee views this as a welcome challenge, taking the initiative to start conversations with the other students who can speak English.

“I mean you have to start conversations because you’re with the same people over and over,” McKee said. “So by the second week, I locked in and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna start seven conversations today and they don’t have to be good. I just want to like, actually talk to people.’”

This has helped McKee break into the close-knit social circle that his class had developed over the last year, which has helped him adjust while he’s away from home, according to his mother Sarah McKee.

“I think it really was tricky for him, to kind of break into some of those friend groups just because they have been together since before he arrived,” Sarah said. “As you can imagine, that would be tricky for anyone coming into a new high school.”

This high school experience does have benefits, according to McKee’s friend junior Espie Lemon, who he’s constantly been texting with ever since he left.

“It’s good for him to look back on this and say, ‘I was able to do that’ and have this new perspective,” Lemon said. “This is a culture shock that’s good to experience when you’re still in high school, because high school students are still more like kids, making it easier to build relationships with them than when you’re an adult.”

Now with only four weeks left in the program, McKee looks forward to getting Starbucks again with friends but is still grateful for his at times strange experience in Denmark.

“I feel like it’s been so fun to just experience and learn about [Denmark],” McKee said. “I mean, even something strange, like how much I miss small talk. You can say it’s a social taboo, you just don’t start conversations with strangers unless you need something.”