Announcing the Official AFS Global Alumni Community
From our first 30 participants in 1946 to more than 8,000 exchange participants in 2026, AFS has grown a global…
AFS Alumni
From New Mexico to the World: How One Year Changed Everything
Phillipa still remembers how different New Mexico felt from the America she’d pictured. The city turned out to be a…
One AFSer learned: It’s not right, it’s not wrong. It’s just different!
More than twenty years after boarding a plane out of Türkiye as a teenager, Gizem Öztürk still carries the lesson…
From Rajasthan to Stanford: How One AFS Experience Changed the Course of a Career
When Abhinav Agarwal, a high school student from Rajasthan, India, received a full scholarship to the AFS Global STEM Academies in…
“Intercultura Changed My Life”: Luca Parmitano’s AFS Story
In 1993, at 17 years old, Luca Parmitano left Catania, Sicily, for a year of study in Mission Viejo, California.…
Mapping the Heart with the Ohlson Family: The Life-Changing Effects of an AFS Experience
In the small coastal city of Falkenberg, in Sweden’s Halland county, Anne-Marie and Karl-Gustav Ohlson raised three daughters. But over…
Mapping the Heart with Cameron Chisholm: The Life-Changing Effects of an AFS Experience
Cameron Chisholm turned 18 somewhere over the Atlantic. He landed in Slovakia on his birthday, in August 1998, a teenager…