The Advocate would like to warmly welcome Lili ‘27 to the Academy. Lili is an exchange student from Budapest, Hungary, joining us for the 2025-2026 school year through the ASSIST Exchange Program.

In Hungary, Lili attends an Austrian state school that only has about 200 students in total. She describes the Academy as, in her own words, “very big, much bigger than my school at home, and not just campus-wise, but also student body-wise.” Along with this, Lili finds the workload at the Academy manageable. She has found it easy to adjust and has also found ways to get involved with our community, such as joining clubs like DECA. She enjoys the 75-minute class period schedule because she thinks the work done in class is more detailed and comprehensive. This is opposed to the seven 50-minute class periods at her school at home. Her only wish? To be able to take one more class!

Being selected as an exchange student is a very rigorous process. Lili applied to and was accepted by the ASSIST Exchange Program. This exchange program is available across multiple continents and connects hundreds of students each year with host schools, allowing international students to explore a true American high school experience. To apply for this program, Lili wrote several essays, and was required to do an oral interview to demonstrate her fluency in English. The process is highly competitive, with only seven other Hungarian students being selected for the program.

One of the biggest changes for Lili has been adapting to Albuquerque’s landscape. Budapest is centered around the Danube River. The city is split up along the river, with one side being Buda and the other side Pest. These two territories and a smaller settlement called Óbuda were unified in 1873 to form the capital city of Budapest. Because of this history, almost every road leads to the Danube River, making the city easy to navigate. Public transportation is also very prevalent, which makes moving around the big city very manageable. Albuquerque, by contrast, feels much more uniform to Lili. She describes Albuquerque noting that “here I don’t even recognize which road I’m on because they all look the same, the houses look the same, and this is also a much newer city, while in Budapest, there are landmarks from the 18th century even.”

Something that Lili especially misses is her mom’s cooking. A food in particular that she craves is lángos, which is a type of flat bread that is typically eaten with sour cream topped with shredded cheese. In Hungary, almost everything is eaten with either cheese, sour cream, or cream cheese. Sour cream, especially, is a very typical addition to many meals, including stews like Goulash. Soups, in particular, are a staple in Hungary and are usually served as appetizers rather than main courses, in contrast to the U.S.

Here, in New Mexico, Lili has enjoyed trying some of our local foods, such as red and green chile, saying she likes green chile. With that checked off her bucket list, she’s well on her way to becoming a true New Mexican.