Most exchange students find the first and second months on
exchange to be the toughest ones. This can be the period when:
Their homesickness is at its worst
They are having the most difficulties with language
They are suffering from culture shock
They most feel like giving up and going home
These feelings usually pass in time. Still, your first two
months on exchange might really test your toughness and mental fortitude.
Churchill
London (Herry Lawford/Flickr)
Recently, I went looking online for the Winston Churchill speech containing his famous “never give in – never, never, never” quote.
Churchill gave the speech in 1942 as an address to students
at his old school. When I found it, the part which caught my eye wasn’t that
famous quote. It was another part of the speech, where Churchill discussed a
proposed amendment to the school’s traditional song. The amendment would have
added a reference to the “darker days” of World War 2. Churchill said:
Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.
Churchill was correct. Greatness – true greatness – doesn’t
occur when things are easy. Greatness always comes from people rising to a
challenge and overcoming great odds to succeed.
Metallica frontman James Hetfield’s greatest hour wasn’t in
1991, when he was the already rich and famous musician who wrote the seminal
riff for “Enter Sandman”. Hetfield’s greatest moment happened ten years
earlier, when he was an orphaned nineteen-year-old working at a sticker factory
in Los Angeles and sitting in his truck during lunch breaks writing songs.
Jon Hamm’s greatest hour didn’t occur on the set of Mad
Men. It took place during the many years in which he waited tables in LA,
toiling to keep his head above water while he worked on his dream of being a
Hollywood actor.
LeBron James’ greatest moment didn’t happen during any of
his three NBA championship seasons. It occurred when he was in high school,
training hard to reach the NBA despite his upbringing as the son of a teen
mother and absentee father.
Your own moment of greatness
(Alan Wu/Flickr)
Your own moment of greatness won’t come at the end of your exchange, when you’ve got everything sorted out and under control. Your moment of greatness is happening right now.
Getting out of bed every day and going to your new school is
heroic.
Hitting the books hard and rote-learning vocabulary and
grammar to the point of exhaustion is one of the hardest mental challenges for
anyone.
Persevering despite the hardships and occasional
embarrassments you encounter as a newly arrived exchange student is incredibly
courageous.
Slowly, your own strength and perseverance will enable you
to climb the mountain which is in front of you. There will be some days when
you feel like you’re moving backwards or sideways instead of progressing. But
as long as you keep working hard and maintain a good attitude, you will keep on
moving forward. Things will get a little easier every day.
There may be times when you feel weak, or embarrassed, or
overwhelmed. All of those feelings are totally normal for an exchange student.
They are unpleasant and can be difficult to deal with. However, you can
deal with these feelings, and succeed in spite of them.
Don’t forget that there are many people around you who want
you to succeed. Although your success ultimately depends upon your own courage
and effort, your host family and exchange organisation will help you in any way
they can.
At the end of your exchange, and for many years into the
future, you are going to look back on this time. You’ll marvel at the grit you
showed and the strength you were able to find within yourself. When times are
tough – for example, at work or in a relationship – you can remind yourself of
this time. You’ll know that the strength you showed as an exchange student can also
get you through virtually any other challenge in life.
Roosevelt
(Ryan Treadwell/Flickr)
In another famous speech, President Theodore Roosevelt said:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
As an exchange student, you are well and truly “in the arena” every day. Keep on working and doing your best, and the triumph of high achievement which Roosevelt talks about will be yours.
Think that you’d like to become an exchange student, but not sure how to go about it?
Relax. This easy 7-step guide will show you what you need to do to apply successfully and be on your way.
Step 1 – Ask yourself – “do I really want to do this?”
“Look before you leap” is great advice – particularly when you’re deciding how to spend a whole year of your life.
The fact is that being a foreign exchange student isn’t always easy. In fact, most people who go on exchange find it to be one of the most challenging things they’ve ever done.
There are far easier ways to spend a year.
Before you take the plunge and put yourself and your parents through the process of applying to be a foreign exchange student, take the time to find out what is involved in a student exchange, and think very carefully and hard about whether you want to do it.
Talk to former exchange students about their experiences overseas.
Visit the home pages of a few student exchange organisations, and learn about their expectations and rules.
Above all, make sure that your decision to become a foreign exchange student is an informed one.
Step 2 – Choose a host country
Once you’ve decided to take the big step and apply for a student exchange, you need to think about where you’d like to exchange to.
There are hundreds of countries on earth, but probably only a couple of dozen which are safe and pleasant to live in. You need to be sure that you choose one of the good ones.
Get advice on choosing a safe, rewarding exchange destination at my choosing a host country page.
Also, look at the UN’s Human Development Index. Generally, the countries at the top of that table are the best places to go on exchange to. The countries that score well on the HDI all have stable societies, good healthcare, low crime, and affluent, good-citizen populations. Those are exactly the same features that make a good host country.
Step 3 – Decide on an exchange organization
Once you’ve decided on a destination country, you need to find a reliable, well-run exchange organisation to undertake your exchange with in that country.
Again, there are probably hundreds of student exchange organisations around the world – good, bad and ugly. You need to think very carefully about which one you go with.
The reason is that if something goes wrong – such as a bad host family or a problem with the school you attend – a good student exchange organisation will have the experience and mechanisms to help you deal with the problem quickly and get on with your exchange. They’ll get you settled with a new host family, or moved to a new school.
Do your research. Check out my page on choosing an exchange program for hints and tips on how to find the best exchange organisation to undertake your exchange with.
Step 4 – Write your exchange application
Make no mistake:
There are lots of people want to go on exchange with the best exchange organisations.
There are also lots of people who want to go to the most popular exchange destinations.
If you’re going to get the exchange you want, you need to beat all of those people. And the most important thing you can do to give yourself a chance of beating them is to write a great exchange application.
How do you write a killer written exchange application? My page on writing an exchange application has loads of inside tips for how to write an application that will blow your competition away and help you to go exactly where you want to go. Check it out.
Step 5 – Undertake your exchange interview
The second step to winning your dream exchange is delivering a great student exchange interview.
Let’s face it: nobody likes being interviewed. Even people who’ve been through dozens of job interviews still find it intimidating.
However, there are many things you can do to prepare yourself for your exchange interview. Some of them are mechanical – like being well-rested and arriving at the interview venue in plenty of time. Others require you to undertake research and preparation. With a little forethought and inside knowledge, you can also anticipate some of the questions the interview panel will ask you.
As part of your preparation for your student exchange interview, be sure to visit my detailed article on preparing for your interview.
Step 6 – Prepare for your departure
Been selected to go on exchange? Congratulations.
While that’s great news, the work isn’t over yet. In fact, it’s really only just begun.
There are a huge number of things that you need to take care of before your departure date. You need to organise travel insurance. You need to get your passport, visa and other paperwork sorted out. Booking flights, making contact with your host family…the list goes on and on.
Your exchange organisation will help you to get organised and should provide you with a checklist of things to take care of. I’ve also prepared a comprehensive “to-do” list discussing all the things you need to think about doing prior to departure, and the order you should do them in. Go take a look.
Step 7 – Get off to a great start
You know that first impressions really matter. But the odds are that you’ve also never been an exchange student before. How do you make a good first impression and get off to a good start with your host family and school colleagues?
There are a number of things you can do during your first weeks as an exchange student that will help you set a solid foundation for the remainder of your exchange. With some care and thought, you can make a great first impression on your classmates and host family that will pay big dividends later on.
My page on making a good first impression is full of actionable tips to help you manage the transition to being an exchange student, and help you make friends and fit in during your first couple of weeks.
I want you to learn the language of your host country well – really well – for one very important reason:
If you speak the language of your host country well, your time on exchange will be much more successful, enjoyable, and easy. You’ll be more outgoing. You’ll fit in better with your classmates and host family. You’ll feel better integrated into society, and more able to enjoy the culture of your host country.
In other words, put in the time to learn the language well, and you’ll reap many rewards. There is literally no downside.
Here’s how to do it.
Tip 1: Grammar isn’t everything, but it is the most important thing
As an exchange student, you’ll most likely learn lots and lots of words and phrases every day.
However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that having a big vocabulary is enough. You will never become a truly accomplished speaker of another language until you understand the grammar, as well.
As an exchange student in Switzerland, I noticed that the exchange students who were the most confident and spoke the best German had an excellent grasp of German grammar. Those students who spoke German less well and with lower confidence generally had a lot of vocabulary, but had poor grammar skills.
Learning the grammar of another language is like learning a computer programming language. Hardly anybody has the patience and dedication to do it properly. However, if you are dedicated enough to really learn the grammar of your new language well, you’ll learn your new language faster and better.
How to do it
You can learn vocabulary of a second language by osmosis – by being around native speakers and listening to them speak.
Grammar isn’t like that. You can’t hope to learn grammar just by listening to others. You need to rote learn grammar concepts, and then do exercises which help those concepts to become ingrained.
Initially, you need to be familiar with a few basic concepts of grammar – the so-called “parts of speech”. In your mother tongue, learn the meaning and roles of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns. Learn about cases (nominative, accusative, dative) and the past, present and future tenses. Find out about the concept of verb conjugation.
Then, do some research into your new language. For example, find out if it has “formal” and “informal” forms of address, and learn when it is appropriate to address people formally and informally. You should also learn whether there are any particularly unusual, difficult or important concepts in the grammar of your new language of which you should be aware. For example, students of French usually really struggle with the subjunctive case.
Next, you need to find a good grammar textbook or other resource. For European languages, I recommend the Schaum Outline series of books. Otherwise, you can check with language teachers at your high school, or call the modern languages faculty at your local university to see which books and other resources they recommend for learning grammar. Whatever you use should explain concepts clearly, contain exercises which allow you to put the theory into practice, and should contain an answer key so that you can check your progress.
Do the time
Once you’ve done your background research and found a good grammar book or other resource, you need to get down to work. Try to set aside some time every day to rote learn your grammar and do some practical exercises. I used to learn German grammar on the 45-minute train trip to and from school while all of my classmates were doing their homework.
Is learning the grammar of your new language in this way dry and boring? Mostly, yes.
But does it give you a giant pay-off? Absolutely.
I guarantee that focussing on grammar and learning it well will make you a more confident and accomplished speaker of your new language.
Tip 2: Consume as much of the new language as possible
Your time as an exchange student represents a unique opportunity to spend all day, every day immersing yourself in another language and culture. Generally speaking, the more of a new language you expose yourself to, the more you’ll retain and recall.
So, from the very first day of your arrival in your host country, you should absolutely binge on the language and culture of your host country. Watch as much TV as possible. Listen to the radio as much as possible. Become a voracious consumer of magazines, newspapers and websites. Talk to anyone and everyone you meet – not only your classmates, but also the elderly lady next door, the conductor on your morning train and the guy who brews your coffee each morning. View every day as an opportunity to stuff your brain with the language of your host country.
Doing this all day, every day, will have several benefits. Like a sponge, your brain will soak up all of the new words and phrases you hear and will store them for you to use later. Hearing all of that language will also help to improve your accent and make it more natural-sounding. You’ll also be able to hear a lot of sound, grammatically correct language, which will help you to see the grammar principles you’re learning (see step 1 above) being put into practice.
Tip 3: Communicate as little as possible in your mother tongue
The flipside of point 2 is that it’s very important for you to consume and speak as little of your native language as possible.
The reason for this is simple:
Your new language needs to become the language which dominates your communication and thought patterns. The longer and more intensively you continue to communicate in your native language, the longer it will take for your new language to get ingrained and become your primary language of communication. And the longer that takes, the less time you’ll have to practise your new language.
And, of course, practice makes perfect.
For this reason, you should stop speaking your native language as much as possible. Keep communications – particularly phone conversations – with your family and friends at home to a minimum. If you have a choice, purchase magazines, books and DVDs in your new language rather than your native language.
Perhaps most importantly, you need to avoid hanging out frequently with other speakers of your native language. Specifically, you should avoid spending too much time with other exchange students who share your first language. It’s true that other exchange students can be fantastic sources of comfort and support – particularly when things are tough. However, if they have the same native language as you, spending too much time with them can also really delay your language learning.
As a compromise, consider hanging out with other students who have a different monative language to you. If your native language is English, hang out with the exchange students from Brazil, or Japan, or Hungary. That way, you’ll still get the benefits of support and camaraderie from other exchange students, but you’ll be much more likely to communicate in your new language.
Tip 4: Get a language mentor
I recently read an article about engineers. It said that you need to do an awful lot of engineering before you can become a good engineer. Irrespective of how smart they are or how good their grades are, engineering graduates usually need to do a lot of hands-on, practical work and make mistakes in order to learn the craft of their profession. Only once an engineer has made those initial mistakes and learned from them can he or she really understand how to do the job well.
Like a new engineer, when you first start learning your new language, you are bound to make a lot of mistakes. You’ll mispronounce things. You’ll use the wrong words. You’ll refer to things by the male pronoun instead of the female pronoun, and vice versa. Making such mistakes and learning from them is all part and parcel of becoming a truly good speaker.
To get you through this initial stage, you need to recruit what I would call a “language mentor”. Your language mentor should be a host parent, host sibling, or other trusted person who speaks the language of your host country as his or her mother tongue.
During the first or second month of your exchange, you should sit down with your language mentor every night for at least a couple of weeks and talk for an hour or two in your new language. The purpose of these discussions will be for you to practise speaking the language and put all of the vocab and grammar you’re learning into practice. It will allow you to make mistakes in a safe, low-pressure environment, in front of a trusted person who won’t react negatively to your mistakes.
The more you speak with your language mentor, the more mistakes you will make and get out of the way so that you don’t make them later. You should become a much more confident and fluid speaker, as well. Try it.
Tip 5: Ask questions of everyone else
Obviously, you’ll lean heavily on your language mentor in your first weeks and months on exchange. But you should also feel free to ask your classmates, teachers, other host family members and fellow exchange students for help with your new language.
Until I was a really confident German speaker, I would constantly ask questions about the language to anyone who was available. I’d ask my classmates about verb conjugations. I’d ask my host siblings how to put things into the past tense. I can even remember pointing to a word in a German-language book and asking a stranger on a train what the word meant.
Did it sometimes take courage to ask so many questions?
Sure. In fact, sometimes I felt like a complete ignoramus, particularly at the start of my exchange year. But I honestly never had anyone react badly to such a request. Everyone was helpful and did their utmost to explain things to me in a useful way. They even spoke very slowly to me at the start of my exchange, when I was really struggling.
Like me, you’ll probably have a thousand questions about your new language, particularly early on in your time on exchange. You might worry that your constant language-related questions will drive people crazy. However, the truth is that almost everyone will see how hard you’re working to learn a new language – their language – and will be happy to help you. So, ask away.
Tip 6: Practise, practise, practise
It’s easy to feel confident about understanding a language when you’re at home in your bedroom learning vocabulary or talking to your language mentor.
It is far harder to put all the theory you’ve learned into practice by conversing with actual people in the real world. In fact, it can be very intimidating to enter a shop, bank, or train station and start interacting with the people who work there.
Here’s the thing, though:
Each time you talk to another person and practise putting sentences together and listening to the response, it gets a little easier. The more you talk in your new language, the better you will get at talking. Keep talking, and your confidence will snowball.
So, talk as much as you can. Join in the dinner table conversation with your host family, the post-soccer game discussion with your class mates, and the before and after-school chit chat on the school bus. It is all a great opportunity to practise your new language and build confidence in your speaking. Make a deliberate effort to go out of your way to talk, rather than sitting there silently.
It’s also important to practise speaking to strangers, too – for example, when you’re shopping or buying train tickets. The reason is that the language and vocabulary you use at home with your host family and at school with your classmates is likely to be different to the vocabulary you use when you’re talking to less familiar people, in more formal situations. You need to talk to people in both familiar situations (eg your host family) and less familiar (eg a bank teller) situations. Talking to people in a broad range of situations will give you an opportunity to practise a broad range of words and phrases.
Tip 7: Supercharge your vocabulary learning
Like most exchange students who are serious about learning their new language, I used to carry around a little note book for language learning. Every time I encountered a new German word which I thought was useful, I’d write it down in the note book.
Unlike most exchange students, though, I’d add details about the word. If the word was a noun, for example, I’d also look up the gender of the word, and the plural form, and would write those down, as well. Then, I’d learn the word, its gender, and the plural, rather than just the word itself.
Learning vocabulary in this way took more time, but ultimately enabled me to speak German in a much more error-free way than if I had just learned the word itself, with no additional detail.
I recommend that you not only keep a little note book to write new words in, but that you add some details which will be useful to know later on. If your new language is like German, with gendered nouns, learn the gender together with each noun you learn. If the language is a tonal language, like Mandarin or Vietnamese, learn the appropriate tone that goes along with each word. If the language has characters which need to be drawn in a particular order, like Japanese, learn that order together with the meaning and pronunciation of the word.
Learning vocabulary in this detailed manner takes more time up front, but will save you much time and many errors down the track.
Do you have any language learning tips or tricks that have worked for you in the past, and which you think could be useful for other exchange students learning a new language? If so, please tell us about them in the comments area below.
(Note from Matt:
This is a lightly-edited excerpt from the forthcoming book “How to have a Successful
High-School Exchange”, which will be available for purchase from
ExchangeStudentTips.com later in 2019)
The “wanting to go home” problem is a kind of evolution of the
“homesickness” problem. Being homesick is one thing. Taking the next step and
deciding to quit your student exchange and go home is quite another.
There are times where it’s totally appropriate to want to return home.
This includes situations where you are in physical danger, or suffer a major
illness. It can also include situations where your host family is unwilling or
unable to support you due to illness or a death in their family, and your
exchange organisation is unable to make alternative arrangements for you. In
these situations, wanting to go home is a totally understandable solution to an
intractable problem. I encourage you to return home under such circumstances.
However, in situations where your decision to go home is basically just evolved homesickness, I urge you to reconsider. Nearly every exchange student wants to go home early at some point during his or her exchange. The gravitational pull of home, the longing to be with biological parents and school friends, and the desire to be in a familiar environment can all be incredibly strong. However, the yearning for all of these things which seems irresistible eventually passes.
If you’re having trouble resisting the siren’s call of an early return
home, try to talk yourself out of it by taking some of the actions below.
Give yourself a quick pep talk
Initially, try to give yourself a quick pep talk which effectively takes
the “going home” option off the table. Tell yourself the following
OK. This is
tough. Really tough, much more than I expected. I am trying my best and working
really hard every day, but things don’t seem to be getting easier. School is
hard. The language is hard. It takes a lot of courage just to get out of bed in
the mornings and start the day and I am always so tired at night.
But, I am not
going to quit. I am going to do something great here and I am not going to
leave and go home until I do it. I have goals that I want to achieve. There are
places that I haven’t been to yet and things I still want to do. There are a
lot of good things about my host country that I don’t want to give up, yet. I
have met some really kind people who have helped me a lot and who will keep
helping me.
I will not quit.
I want to kick ass and I will not quit.
I know that in
three months’ time – one month even – things will be easier. My language skills
will be better. I’ll know my way around better. I’ll be more relaxed and
happier. If I go home now, I’ll miss those times and all the other good things
that lie ahead.
I miss Mom and
Dad and my friends at home, and they miss me. But they want me to be here and
want me to do well. I want to go home – not early, but at the appointed time –
and look them in the eye and feel how proud they are of what I’ve done. Because
I stuck it out and did something really hard, but that will benefit me for the
rest of my life.
Thousands of
other exchange students have done it. And I will do it, too.
Think about the negative consequences
When you think about leaving your exchange and going home early, you
probably only focus on the positive consequences of doing so. You think about
seeing your biological family and friends again. You think about going back to
your former, easier life, with no culture shock and no language barrier. You
think that you’ll get on the plane and that’ll be it. Easy, peasy.
Ask yourself, though- if you return home, what will the negative
consequences be? In student exchange terms, a student who decides to go home early
is basically exercising the nuclear option. It’s a decision which usually
leaves a lot of wreckage behind.
For one, your decision may leave many people disappointed and upset. A
lot of people have worked hard to give you the opportunity to be on exchange,
including your biological parents, your exchange organisation, your host family
and people at the school which is hosting you. All of these people will most
likely feel that the time, effort and money which they have put in amounted to
nothing.
Your host family in particular might take your decision personally, and
may feel like failures. Your host parents and your host school may decide not
to host another exchange student, which may prevent others from having the
opportunity that you’ve had.
You might also experience some personal negative consequences. For
example, when you return to your school at home, many people will want to know
why you came back early. If you’re honest, your explanation will be that you
found it too difficult to be on exchange and decided to come home. Unfairly or
otherwise, people might think that you simply gave up or were too scared or
weak to see your exchange through to the end. Likewise, while a completed
student exchange will look great on your resume, and can be a real asset to
your career, you will need to explain a half-completed exchange (and the
reasons it was half-completed) to any potential employer.
Will you regret your decision later?
If you’ve ever participated in a competitive sport, you’ll know that sometimes, something unusual happens.
When you don’t win a game, or don’t run as fast as you wanted to, or swim fewer laps than you wanted to, the overriding feeling isn’t anger or loss. Sometimes, the strongest emotion is a feeling of guilt and disappointment in yourself. In the shower after the game, or on the ride home, you feel that you could have met your goal or won the game if you’d just given an extra 5 or 10 per cent. Because you didn’t, you feel guilty and remorseful.
People who break off a student exchange and return home often experience
similar emotions. While it felt impossible
for them to complete their student exchanges at the time, in hindsight, it was
just very difficult. Looking back,
they realise that they had it within them to complete their exchange, and wish
that they’d done so.
Ask yourself – is the situation you find yourself in now really an
impossible one? Or is it just one which is difficult, and which will seem like
a temporary setback if you choose to return home? Remember that you’re much
stronger and more able than you think you are. Don’t underestimate yourself.
Think about what you’d be giving up
Another thing that may encourage you to re-consider a decision to return
home early is to focus on what you’ll be giving up if you return to your home
country.
For most exchange students, being on exchange is their one and only
chance to live in a foreign country for an extended period. They get a chance
to do new things and meet new people almost every day. Most exchange students
who complete their exchanges have very fond memories of their time on exchange.
They see that time as a brief but extremely valuable interlude which greatly
enriched their lives, opened many doors and gave them many cherished
friendships, skills and memories.
By comparison, your biological family and home country will always be
there. In fact, it’s likely that you’ll spend the remainder of your life in
your home country, in close and regular contact with your biological family.
The time you have in your host country, on the other hand, is extremely
limited. When it comes to an end, it will likely do so forever.
Sadly, also, once you’ve been home for a couple of months and are back
into your old groove, that groove may start to feel like a rut. You may begin
to regret your decision to come home. You may start to think about the new and
exciting experiences you voluntarily passed up in order to get back to a
situation which now feels like a rut.
For many people, a student exchange is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Once it’s gone, that’s it. Don’t pass up that chance unless you absolutely have
to.
Avoid triggering events
While it’s possible to take steps to deal with a desire to return home,
ultimately it’s far better not to have that desire in the first place.
What turns mere homesickness into a genuine desire to return home? Often,
there’ll be an event which triggers the change. Most commonly, a student’s
boyfriend or girlfriend or parents from home will come to visit. Such visits
can be extremely disruptive and often leave the student feeling more homesick
than ever. As discussed elsewhere in this book, if your parents, boyfriend or
girlfriend want to visit you whilst you’re on exchange, either discourage them
from doing so altogether, or ask them to visit only towards the very end of
your exchange.
Alternatively, the student might have some sort of big showdown or
confrontation with a member of his or her host family. Instead of eating humble
pie, saying sorry and trying to repair the relationship, exchange students will
sometimes use such a situation as a pretext for going home. If this happens to
you, be humble enough to make amends with your host family – even if you think
they’re in the wrong – and move on. Being able to say sorry will be an
essential skill later in your life – particularly in your marriage, but also in
your career – and can make a big difference to your success as an exchange
student.
Try to avoid events which will push you from being someone who’s merely
homesick, to someone who is actively trying to return home.
—–
For your sake, and for the sake of those who’ve supported
you and want your student exchange to succeed, please don’t make a rushed
decision to return home mid-exchange. Do your absolute best to make it work.
