“Welcome to the 87th Oscars!”

Laura Vander Kerken’s eyes light up when she hears Neil Patrick Harris announce the opening of the 2015 Academy Awards on TV.

“Oscar day,” as she calls it, has been marked for several weeks on her calendar.

“I’ve been waiting so long for this moment,” she says from a friend’s dorm couch, surrounded by friends, a basket of popcorn and a Coke.

A year ago, Laura could never have imagined she would be watching the Oscars in Champaign.

“I am grateful to be here.” she exclaimed.

She first traveled to the U.S. from Belgium at 18, after

graduating from high school and saying goodbye to her mother for a year.

“That was one of the hardest things to do for me, saying goodbye to my mum,” she said. “But I felt it was time to do something on my own.”

So Laura, 22, decided to re-do her senior year in the U.S. — in a place she’d never heard of: Pataskala, Ohio. The move would change her life. She came to a country of free soda refills in restaurants and clerks who pack grocery bags.

“Home in Belgium was never the same after that year in Ohio,” Laura said.

Now, five years later, thanks to an exchange program with her home university in Antwerp, Belgium, Laura is in a dormitory, listening to the speeches of Patricia Arquette, Julianne Moore and other actors at the Oscars.

“I just had to go back to the States,” she said.

As an aspiring actress, Laura sees the Oscars as “the climax of a movie year … And, most of all, it is a hell of an American show!” It is when Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu takes the stage to receive the Oscar for Best Director that touches Laura .

The native Mexican director symbolizes what Laura hopes to be one day: “an immigrant in the United States.”

Every night, Laura searches the Internet to find a job in the U.S.

“I came across this job in San Francisco. The phone interview went well until at the end the lady asked me if I had legal authorization to work in the U.S. When I told her no, she said she would run it through HR.”

That was weeks ago, and Laura hasn’t heard back. Yet, she keeps trying to get her U.S. lawful permanent residency or her “green card.”

Finding love in the U.S. is also something she thinks about. Laura dated an American boy in Ohio, but on their first date, Laura never expected what would happen.

“He took me out on the most controversial date I have ever been on,” she said. “He picked me up, and we drove for at least one hour. We stopped at a house of friends of his in the middle of nowhere. … He opened the trunk and pulled out two guns, a handgun and a shotgun. I got to shoot both.”

A marriage proposal might have been in her future but, after a month, Laura had to return to Belgium. Still, Laura thinks about it: “What if I married him?”

It’s the middle of an Illinois winter, and Laura is dressed in layers of clothes, a fluffy hat and scarf to battle the cold.

“It’s not that different than Ohio here: The cornfields, the cold, the people, the food. It is the Midwest, and it is just amazing,” she said. “Yet it has not been easy to make American friends, not in Pataskala, not in Champaign.”

“It’s a cliché to think American people are really approachable … from the first time you meet them,” Laura said. “Everyone knew me in high school. I was the Belgian girl, but I knew no one.”

After a couple of weeks, she discovered the secret of friendship: sports. Although she hates playing sports, she joined the swim team. She never felt left out again. But she also learned something about American teens: “Once you are friends with them, they are friends for life.”

The sometimes conservative beliefs of Americans did surprise Laura. “In Belgium, we even had a gay prime minister for four years, who cares?”

Yet Laura still considers Americans the most nonjudgmental people.

“Belgians are always aware of their looks and how they need to act in a certain situation. Students at my Belgian high school wore the same … brands. I wore whatever I wanted, and I remember girls gossiping about my outfit … I can wear whatever I want here and no one will judge me,” she said with a smile.

She has also been surprised by the American work ethic. “People work so hard here. … Once my teacher in Pataskala showed me pictures of his house being ruined by a tornado. … His reaction was, ‘Well, it is just the Midwest. I’ll just have to rebuild it.’ Last summer a hailstorm hit my hometown. None of the houses were damaged but, still, there was a national outcry simply because some of the cars were dented.”

Laura finds the can-do attitude of Americans amazing and admirable.

“Their optimism and sense for putting everything in perspective struck me very much.”

Despite her love for all things American, Laura knows she must return home by the end of May.

“If I could,” she said, “I would just stay here forever.”

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