September-December 2020 Semester

I spent the September-December 2020 semester with this program learning Russian as part of my gap year. I wanted to be immersed in a Russian-speaking environment, learning about the language, the culture, and meeting new people. Despite being the only student in my classes due to COVID, I still got out of this program everything and more than I was expecting. My host family, a mom and 7-year-old son, were very kind and helpful for my Russian. I probably talked with them for almost two hours every day. We ate meals together, and I tried multiple new foods every week. The host family made me feel very comfortable and at home.
I was able to choose three science classes in topics that interested me (Programming, Biochem, Econ), and these classes were very interesting and introduced me to topics which I might want to study in uni. The teachers were very knowledgeable and spoke with me in Russian, allowing me to practice vocabulary in hard subjects like these. The Russian classes were also very interesting, and I got a lot out of them. The teachers could answer any question I asked completely and clearly, and our classes often went into the format of a conversation, giving me a lot of time to practice speaking Russian. When I started this program, I struggled to have basic conversations, but after just three months, I was able to have hour-long conversations with relative ease.
In years without COVID, there are usually lots of excursions with the program. Although there weren't any with the program during my semester, I was still able to travel around Latvia, with a British student doing an internship in Daugavpils, and I was able to see Riga three times, Sigulda, and Liepaja, all very pretty places. I would recommend these trips to anyone traveling to Latvia. COVID didn't really affect my experience until the last couple of weeks of my stay when it got worse.
I would 100% recommend this program to anyone wanting to learn Russian. The classes, people, host family, sightseeing, and being constantly surrounded by Russian made this experience one of the most productive and fulfilling 3 months of my life.