Upon finishing high school, Yulia Shenderovich felt she wanted to study outside Belarus, her home country. She knew a graduate from the American University in Bulgaria, whose parents told stories about how many friends he had made there, how he met his wife-to-be at AUBG, and what a prosperous career he had now. Exactly this person made the idea of going to AUBG seem more realistic to Yulia. When she looked the university up on the Internet and found out it offers a liberal arts education, extracurricular activities, and scholarships for foreigners, Yulia decided to come to Blagoevgrad, a “friendly, neat, quiet and colorful” city as she describes it. Did having such high expectations leave her disappointed upon arrival?

“No, I was very enthusiastic as a first-year student. AUBG was a huge jump from what I have seen in Russia and Belarus,” Yulia remembers. What impressed her at first, among other things, was how kind Bulgarians were. “I was looking for the bank with a friend of mine and the people we asked not only told us where to go, but also took us there,” she explains. And this happened on more than one occasion.

A year and a half later, Yulia is studying both Political Science and Journalism and Mass Communication. In addition to that, through her ambition and hard work, she has managed to become one of the editors-in-chief of Verve, one of the AUBG magazines (www.vervemagazine.net), and a member of the AUBG Student Ambassadors Club, which is part of the University Events Office and provides its members with the opportunity to participate in all high-profile AUBG events and to meet all guests of the university.

Yulia believes that all these extracurricular activities that AUBG provides its students with are another opportunity for them to find themselves and what really fits them best. “I appreciate extracurricular activities a lot,” she says. “They develop your personality, plus you have fun.” What she has learned from this experience is “teamwork skills, ethics, crisis management, following regulations and a better idea of how to lead people in an organized fashion.” Yulia says she cannot come up with even one name of a friend of hers who is not involved with something outside the academic curriculum. “Of course, this is as well something to put in your CV,” she adds.

Yulia lives in one of the spacious AUBG residence halls, which she regards as an essential part of the AUBG experience. “It helps you and prepares you for when you graduate, because you learn how to find common language with people, to make compromises, to communicate with people different from you,” Yulia says. “You learn to adjust to other people’s needs and wants.” Knowing nothing about Mongolia as a country or culture, Yulia spent a year sharing a room with two Mongolian girls. “Now I know everything about Mongolia,” Yulia laughs. Residential life at AUBG is what helps students make real friends, Yulia says. “You see people as they are having the chance to spend 24 hours a day with them,” she explains. Yulia believes that at AUBG you learn how to make life-long friends despite the differences in cultural backgrounds. Being away from home is not a problem for her, either. “I enjoy it a lot. When I go home, I miss the AUBG life full of events.”

Yulia says that AUBG’s small size of just under 1,400 students, faculty, and staff is what makes for a memorable experience. You can get to know your professors better, and communicating freely with them gives you a chance to further develop yourself, she says. Yulia says she now knows much better what she wants from life. She has a Bulgarian boyfriend and although she really wants to go back to Belarus after graduating, she says finding a job up to her standards there would be difficult.