Abstract:

We as educators have the responsibility of guiding the future members of our society. With all the social problems we are facing, we need "global" citizens with sensibility, inclusion, and understanding of a global culture.
The best tool we have to achieve this is education and exchange programs.

We can define exchange as the act of giving something to someone and them giving you something in return, but ¿how can we translate this into education?
Exchange programs became popular after World War II, with the intention of increasing the understanding and tolerance of other cultures, as well as improving their language skills and broadening their social horizons.

We have taken for granted these opportunities that most educational institutes offer to their students, and we have the responsibility of incentivizing our students to participate in these programs that allow for cultural and educational exposure that goes beyond the traditional classroom.
This document presents the research results of the impact that exchange programs have on the life decisions of our students. We explore the before and after global perspectives our students have and how they will affect their life decisions after college.

The investigation was carried out in two stages:
1. Exchange programs in the early stages of education (high school): We will show the correlation between former exchange students all over the world and their life decisions due to their exchange programs and how they all include a global vision.
2. Exchange programs in higher education (college): we will show the correlation between students who went through an exchange program and their before and after mindset of cultural understanding and their work decisions or expectations.

As a result of the research, it was found that the exchange programs helped students transform their perspective of themselves and the world; they all changed their professional path to an international perspective and saw the future as a global possibility of inclusion and growth.

Keywords:

Exchange, education, cultures, global, inclusion.