When I chose to stay for Kallah, I honestly wasn't thinking that was going to happen. I went to ILTC and I had a really good time, but I felt like I didn’t get enough of a life-changing experience, as everyone said that I would. I also spent 3 weeks there and was honestly ready to go home. However, towards the end of ILTC, I was texting my friend who had done full Perlman the year before, and she was telling me how life-changing Kallah is and that I should stay. I honestly wasn’t sure how right she was when I had heard all my friends tell me how life-changing ILTC is. In the last week of ILTC, I actually had to make a decision. On our last power outage, when me and all my friends were standing outside of the hotel, I told Moe that I wanted to extend to full.

Now, I am so unbelievably happy that I listened to my friend who told me to stay full, because she was 100 percent right. Kallah was life-changing for me. Every single day I learned something new. I got in touch with my Judaism more, I learned more about Israel, I gained friendships that will hopefully last a lifetime, and I truly got to express myself a lot more at Kallah than I did at ILTC. At Kallah, there were a lot more musically inclined programs and people, which I was honestly very happy about. I made some of my now really close friends by playing instruments with them or even just trying to learn them. I am now so grateful for all of the connections and friends I made during Kallah, and I cannot wait to see what happens at IC now that I have met all of these amazing people.