Marcus Hoyle had no qualms about coming to the United States last summer amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’d been stuck in the house for so long, and I wanted to get out, travel and do some things that were slightly normal,” he said.
The 17-year-old exchange student from the United Kingdom arrived in Indianapolis on Aug. 8, 2020, and was met by his host family, Scott and Jennifer Miller of Seymour.
“I was real excited to come to America, but I was very nervous traveling on my own,” Hoyle said. “I’d never gotten on a plane on my own before and had to get on two planes on my own coming here.”
Hoyle, who lives in York, England, started out on a flight from Manchester to France with his mother.
“His mom actually flew to Paris with him for the first flight and then got him on the plane in Paris to make sure he at least got the main flight to get to the U.S.,” Jennifer Miller said.
Hoyle’s plane landed in the busiest airport in the United States, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and that was very stressful for him.
“Finding the gate with how big the airport was and having to get a train to get all the way to the other side was a new experience,” Hoyle said. “Doing all that and managing to get my flight, I had to be responsible.”
On the flight to the United States, Hoyle was feeling a bit homesick because he had never gone for more than a week without seeing his mother. He said there’s a massive difference between being apart for a week and being apart for 10 months.
In April 2020 after everything was finalized and they knew they were going to host Marcus, the Millers started doing a weekly FaceTime call with him on Fridays.
They did that pretty much every single week May through July leading up to when Marcus arrived in Seymour, Jennifer said.
“I think for him, he was probably the most comfortable and the most familiar with the family he was going to,” she said. “Unlike some exchange students, who might have just one or two video chats before they come or send emails and messages back and forth but not spending an hour or two every week chatting.”
Through those weekly chats, Jennifer said they got to know Marcus pretty well before he arrived.
“That really helped, and I felt at home as soon as I got here because I managed to have gotten to know everyone,” Hoyle said.
Hoyle visited New York City for his birthday prior to 2020, so this is not his first visit to America.
“I saw the 9/11 memorials at Ground Zero, went to an NBA game at Madison Square Garden, went to the top of the Rockefeller building, visited Central Park and the Natural History Museum,” he said.
Hoyle is attending Seymour High School as a junior.
“Even with the hybrid schedule, he’s allowed to go all four days, so we transitioned to that back in October,” Jennifer said. “Because he’s an exchange student and here for the academic program, they allowed him to go full time.”
Hoyle said high school back home in England is different from high school here.
“We don’t have school uniforms or strict dress codes here like back in England,” he said. “Most kids my age drive to school here, but in England, kids mostly cycle or walk because we’re too young to drive.”
Youths must wait until age 17 to get a driver’s license in England.
“We finish high school at 16, and after that, we’ve got two options: You either start an apprenticeship, like with construction, electrician or plumbing, and do that for two years and get a job or you can go to college, but it’s not like college here,” Hoyle said. “It’s an extension of high school, and you pick subjects to help lead you on to university.”
Hoyle said he has considered studying nursing when he goes to the university but still needs to think about it a little bit more to figure out what he wants to do. He also has thought of law enforcement.
“Ultimately, he’d like to end up back in the United States to live, so he has to consider career-wise what would lead to an opportunity to be in the U.S. long term,” Jennifer said.
Hoyle is the sixth exchange student the Millers have welcomed to their home, but he is the first boy they have hosted since they first started with International Student Exchange in 2011.
“I’ve been asked several times why we would want an exchange student who speaks English who comes from an English-speaking country because most of the time, our kids are coming from anywhere in the world where English is their second or third language,” Jennifer said.
She said Marcus is actually the first student from the United Kingdom that their organization has had.
“We joke a lot because where he is coming to us from, Yorkshire, his York dialect is very much a foreign language at times when he speaks,” she said.
Jennifer said British-English and American-English are not the same at all.
“They are different in vocabulary and pronunciations, and the culture is similar in some ways, but it’s also very different,” she said. “So from an exchange standpoint, we’ve learned a lot from him the same we have from our other students, and sometimes, I feel like I’m still having to translate what he says, like to clarify what he’s saying.”
Besides visiting New York and New Jersey on his previous trip to the United States, Hoyle has now been to Indiana, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina since August.
The Millers took Marcus to Daytona and the northern part of Florida during Thanksgiving week and plan on visiting southern Florida for spring break so he can see the Everglades.
“He’s fascinated and scared to death of alligators, so that’ll be fun to take him to visit that,” Jennifer said. “Our oldest is getting married in April, so he’s going to experience an American wedding and also some camping trips in the spring.”
The day after Christmas, Jennifer said they went to Giordano’s pizzeria in downtown Indianapolis.
“We had wanted to go to Chicago, which I typically do every year with our exchange students, but that’s not a possibility right now,” she said. “The closest thing to that was to go to Indianapolis, and that was an adventure.”
That day, they also went to the Indiana State Museum and saw the new “Wonder Woman 1984” movie at IMAX Theatre. When they walked out, Hoyle said it felt like life was normal again.
“Even though we were in the movies with our masks on and everything else, there was just that feeling of this being kind of a normal thing,” Miller said. “Because for both of us, it had been about 10 months since we had been at a movie theater.”
Hoyle said there was a tradition back home of going to the cinema with his friend every weekend.
“It felt good to be at the cinema again and in that environment,” he said. “It feels like coming back to normal again just a little bit.”
Hoyle enjoys speaking to his mom every weekend, and sometimes when he’s walking to the gym, he’ll have a phone call with her on the way.
He said his family is doing well back home, but they also are struggling a little bit because England is in its second national lockdown due to the pandemic.
The only time they can go out of the house is to exercise or go to the supermarket. Only essential workers are going to work. Everyone else is working from home.
“Schools are closed, and everything else is closed, so it seems like it would be really boring if I was still there,” Hoyle said. “It was really hard to get through lockdown in England the first time because it was March through June, and now, it’s going to be December through March. I hope I get back just in time for it to be all over.”
Jennifer said she thinks it has been good for Marcus to experience life here.
“Coming here on a program for a semester or a whole year can help you figure out who you are and what you really want to do with the rest of your young career with college and university studies and gain a little bit of independence,” she said.
Hosting an exchange student is always an adventure for the Millers.
“No matter how many times we might go to the Indiana State Museum or the IMAX or to a restaurant, it’s always fun to take someone new for the first time and see that experience through their eyes,” Jennifer said.
The number of students currently in Indiana and the region through International Student Exchange is at about 15% this year, she said.
“That’s pretty much the same across the board and across the country, and there are several organizations that did not make it through the pandemic and had to close their doors and were not able to keep going,” she said.
Miller said ISE, which is the second largest organization that works with the high school exchange students, is a nonprofit organization, so it was a struggle, but it was able to be in a position to be smart about what it did.
She said several students who were signed up deferred for the current school year and will be arriving this August instead after they chose to sit out for a year.
“There were quite a few kids, probably about 70% of them, who had to cancel their program,” Jennifer said. “So because academically this was the one year that worked for them, they don’t have that opportunity now.”
Moving forward, with the number of kids who have deferred and then their anticipated normal numbers, the plan for the upcoming school year is to operate as normal.
“We’re anticipating the same number of students that we typically would have, so the same need for host families and school placements is there,” Jennifer said. “Seymour usually has four to six ISE students annually, and this year, Marcus is the only one, so that’s a big difference.”
Hoyle said he will be returning to England on June 16 and would definitely recommend the exchange program to other students.
He said a lot of people see news or movies about America and what it’s like, but it’s a completely different world to actually live in a small town.
“It’s so different than what you see on TV, and it’s just a different atmosphere and environment,” he said. “Our cultures are similar, but the two countries act differently, dress differently, eat different foods and have other little differences in cultures.”