To most teenagers, the concept of leaving their entire lives behind for a boarding school in a foreign nation is an inconceivable one, predictable in fiction but completely unimaginable in real life. For junior Kelzang Tobgyel, however, this premise isn’t that of a favorite book or movie but the course of her high school experience.
Formerly a student at Oak Park High School, Tobgyel now attends the United World College (UWC) Costa Rica, the Central American branch of a worldwide program with locations everywhere from Singapore to the Netherlands. Students from across the world learn and board at these institutions–UWC Costa Rica is home to around 200 students from over 70 countries.
Tobgyel is the first in the Oak Park community to partake in an experience like UWC, but her ties to the program run deep: her mother attended UWC Canada as a teen, the memories of which she still retains.
“I would always hear stories about [her] experiences when I was a kid, and that’s kind of interested me in going,” Tobgyel said. “What really drew me in was the friendships that she has with people at school: she still has her group chat with her year from UWC Pearson Canada, and they’re always texting and updating each other on their lives. Having lifelong friends from all over the world is something that is an incredible opportunity that no one is ever going to get and hearing about all these friendships and these stories for my mom is what really, I guess, inspired me to go for it.”
Before she even applied, Tobgyel had to consider the realities of the program. Not only would she be moving thousands of miles from everyone and everything she knew, she’d also have to take part in the notoriously rigorous–and largely self-taught–International Baccalaureate (IB) program central to UWC’s academic mission. Once she did apply, the decision as to where in the world she’d end up was out of her hands: a selection committee determined it for her.
“With the selection process, you don’t really get to choose your school,” Tobgyel said. “It’s different for every country, but for the U.S., there’s a selection process that you go through, and then once you are selected, they look through your application and decide the school for you. I talked about biology and sustainability [in my application], and Costa Rica [is] all about conservation and wildlife. So I got sent here.”
From the outside looking in, Tobgyel’s life in Costa Rica seems perfect. Who wouldn’t envy the opportunity of a lifetime in one of the most beautiful places in the world? But there’s nearly always a discrepancy between expectations and reality, and UWC is no exception to this rule.
“Everyone thinks that UWC’s kind of like this… utopian experience where everything goes perfect all the time, which is something that you have to prepare to distort your perception of,” Tobgyel said. “And, I mean, yeah, I also thought it was gonna be the perfect experience. But when you get here, you realize that you’re by yourself in another country and you don’t know anyone.”
Tobgyel was able to circumvent homesickness for the most part by quickly finding a solid group of friends, but many others struggled on that front, with some even wishing to go home. Tobgyel attributes her quick adjustment to the relentlessly busy schedule of activities adopted during her initial weeks at UWC, “constantly doing things with people all the time.”
Now, four months in, Tobgyel is prepping for her first return home since leaving, an occasion both long-anticipated, but also, in some ways, apprehended: in the passing months, Tobgyel has changed rapidly and is a very different person upon her return.
“This is a conversation that I’ve had with a lot of my co-years and second years here. Everyone says you don’t feel yourself changing, but when you go home, you notice how much you’ve changed.” Tobgyel said. “Because everyone’s kind of in the same place that you left, but when you go home, you’re sort of like a completely different person, but you’re still yourself.”
Tobgyel attributes this change to the diversity of perspectives she’s surrounded by at UWC, which actively encourages the type of conversations that cause such epiphanies. In Theory of Knowledge, a course described by Tobgyel as a “rip-off philosophy class”, students are able to discuss broad, often polarizing questions freely.
“Our teacher proposed a question: if you could pick the best government for the world in general, what would it be? And while a lot of people said socialism, my friend from Mauritius said a dictatorship, which was crazy to think for me,” Tobgyel said. “Because you’re like ‘dictatorship equals violence, equals oppression’. But what he said that was really interesting was that dictatorships have worked a lot in Africa and one of the main reasons that they don’t work is because of western influences. And I was like, wow. It shows you how western centric everything that we’ve been doing is.”
Culture shocks go both ways. One of the most jarring moments for Tobgyel was during the school’s thematic week, when she and other members of the “North American Family” did a presentation on gun violence in the US and lockdown drills.
“I remember when we were talking about [gun violence] in the class, everyone who sat there just looked at us with shock on their face about our drills,” Tobgyel said. “Not even about gun violence in general, about our lockdowns, which is crazy because they’re so normalized for us. But when I was talking about it to a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were, and I was explaining it, it just seemed so dystopian. It seemed so unreal that it’s something that we have to do every semester.”
The heavier aspects of American culture weren’t the only ones discussed during thematic week: during a soccer game between first and second years, Tobgyel also had the opportunity to introduce her peers to football rituals.
“I remember I’d dressed my friend up in this cheap cheerleader costume,” Tobgyel said. “She’s Italian and she had no idea what she was supposed to do, so she just ran around the field and threw her pom poms. And we taught them some football chants. First years were blue and second years were red, so we brought blue glitter, blue paint and we painted everyone’s faces like a football game. Everyone had so much fun and I remember just everyone was screaming and cheering for our friends. That’s one of my favorite memories, I’d say. Bringing American culture to UWC.”
For Tobgyel, who is a nature lover of the highest degree, Costa Rica is the perfect place to be. Surrounded by iguanas, raccoons, birds and bees, biology class takes a non-traditional approach.
“My biology teacher is literally the best guy I’ve ever known in my whole life,” Tobgyel said. “He’s this bird lover watcher guy who has a PhD in zoology. And being in Costa Rica is such a good location for biology because he takes us outside and we just like to look at birds.”
Tobgyel now considers herself a seasoned birdwatcher.
“Actually, I have a bird IDing app now. On campus, we have a lot of different types of birds. My favorite one that I’ve seen is the green breasted mango,” Tobgyel said.
The UWC Costa Rica campus is directly engrained with the ecosystem of the area it was built in: in fact, concerns have been raised that when the campus moves to a new location next year, the local fauna will suffer.
“We have a lot of stingless bees that like to go in our compost and stuff,” Tobgyel said. “They’re really cool because you can literally just stick your hand in the stingless bees and they won’t do anything. That’s another thing that I’m worried about, because the stingless bees won’t have a home once they rebuild on the grounds that we have.”
In more ways than one, the school has become part of the local ecosystem. Students often volunteer in the nearby town of Santa Ana, twenty minutes from the Costa Rican capital of San Jose, as part of community action days, though difficulties arise from the language barrier.
“It’s hard when you go to town for the first month because you don’t know what people are saying and you’re kind of just standing there, and you need a Spanish speaker with you at all times,” Tobgyel said. “But after a while, you do really pick up on the language and you do pick up on certain phrases; after a while, you kind of integrate your way and find out how to get around.”
In light of her new passions, discovered at UWC, there remains a space for students to pursue what they loved before, as well. Tobgyel is currently working on a short film as part of a creativity elective.
“It’s going to be a two-year film project, and we’re starting with this question: what makes you feel at home? As the semesters go on, we’re going to make the question smaller and smaller. The second semester, it’s gonna be, what makes you feel? Because you’re kind of feeling everything, you’ve come back from just being at home.”
As the question gets shorter, more room is left for interviewees to speak abstractly.
“Then third semester, when all the deadlines are due and everything and you’re, like, dying inside, it’s, what makes you? What’s your foundation?” Tobgyel said. “And then fourth is just, what? Because the experience is coming to an end, and you’re saying bye to all your friends.”
With only four semesters together, the fleeting nature of the UWC experience can be hard for students to fully comprehend. The reality that, after graduation, close friends will scatter to four corners of the globe is a tough pill to swallow.
“This is something I cried about yesterday,” Tobgyel said. “I was on this hill with my friends, and I was like, how is my UWC experience one fourth over? Like, nothing’s ever gonna compare to this, being here with people from 70+ nationalities and having friends from all over the world.”
UWC might not last forever, but the memories made during it certainly will. Open mic nights are a common way students at UWC showcase their talents, and after one where Tobgyel’s friend played Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”, she and a group of friends found an opportunity to connect through music.
“After the open mic, we all went to his room, because we were friends with his roommate. They both played guitar and we just sang a bunch of different songs. We were showing each other our different music tastes and songs from our cultures. It was so fun. We sang a bunch of Bob Dylan songs. We sang ‘Banana Pancakes.’ I think that’s the night that we actually connected and got to know each other.”
This type of connection is at the core of UWC’s mission: to show young people that no matter where you come from, humanity is ubiquitous and commonality can be found everywhere–an ethos that, if applied in the real world, could work to solve a lot of problems.
“I think that really just shapes and illustrates what the UWC experience is. You’re connecting with people from all over the world of different cultures, but in the end, you’re all just people and you’re all together having a good time.”
