PLC Sydney as my Exchange School

Hi everyone, 

Ya girl is really on that blog grind (sorry if that made you cringe) and back with a new post today! Like my last post about the boarding-house, this one also has to do with my school life in Australia. Today I am talking about the school itself that I am attending while I am here in Sydney. The school is called Presbyterian Ladies’ College, better known as PLC Sydney. I want to tell you about my experiences at the school as an exchange student.

Let me start with stating that this school is ultimate goals. The atmosphere at the school is great and the campus is really aesthetically pleasing. All the beige buildings surrounded by palm trees and other plants/flowers look very pretty together. Unlike my own school at home, PLC consists of different buildings. For example, you have a science building, an art building, a language building, etc. Between periods you have to walk outside from one building to another. It is not very widespread so it takes you about 5 minutes in total to go from the science building to the art building for example. Also, they have a library as big as my entire school in the Netherlands. I am not even kidding. There are a few classrooms in the library building as well. The books in the library are amazing. They have a fashion and philosophy section that this little book-nerd gets very jealous of. I am doing so many fun things every day that I don’t get to read any of them, but I took a few pictures of books I really want to read once I return to the Netherlands.

As I said, I am doing a lot of fun stuff every day. This is really true. Here, there doesn’t really exists a normal school day for an exchange student. First of all, we only go to school for 3 days because every Thursday and Friday we go out with Mrs. White (the exchange-coordinator) on excursions (blogposts about this very soon!). She is one of the friendliest persons I have ever met and she is very inspiring. Apart from the excursions, the school organizes events for the entire school as well. For example, last week we had a swimming carnival which was really fun (another blogpost that is coming very soon). Then, when we do have a normal school day we still have activities planned such as tennis lessons, swimming in the pool, cooking classes and going to the gym at school. As you can I imagine, I am never bored here.

Apart from planning tons of activities, they care for us in other ways too. I feel really welcomed by both the teachers and students. During assembly the school welcomed us by calling out our names and clapping for us, sometimes a random teacher talks with us, we can sit with everyone we want during the breaks and Mrs White makes sure we see her every morning and asks if everything is going well. 

Then some more about the school life as a PLC student; they have some different subjects. For example; design & technology, nutrition and legal studies. Also, instead of following 9 subjects (or in my case 10), here the students only follow 6 subjects and they go deeper into the material. A reason why you might want to move to Australia; they only have tests about twice a year. Imagine how much less stress you would experience without all those late-night study sessions…

What’s also different from the Netherlands is that here the students do extracurricular activities. You can choose from different sports such as soccer, field hockey, tennis, badminton, gymnastics, diving, swimming and much more. You play matches during the weekends. So instead of a sports club, you play via the school. Apart from sports, there are also other activities such as debating, theatre, public speaking and MUN. At my normal school we do have some of these activities as well, however, here they meet up with their club more often and I would say the extracurriculars are more intense. 

I think this is about everything you need to know about PLC. It is a really cool school and I am already sad that I have to leave! 

I will speak to you very soon!

With love,

Frederique