Katrina DeVaney left her home three days early, skipped her last day of school and spent 31 hours on planes from Ho Chi Minh City, to Tokyo, to Los Angeles, to Chicago for one reason. To study journalism for five weeks at the National High School Institute.

After spending the weekend with her sister in Chicago, DeVaney finally arrived in Evanston. But she still suffered 12-hour jet lag. 

“It took me two weeks to get used to Chicago time,” she said. “I kept taking naps everyday.”

Not all cherubs had to travel so far for the program.

Megan Kozak didn’t have very far to go. Despite a few construction detours, Kozak and her parents managed to get to from Hawthorn Woods, Ill., to Jones Residential College at Northwestern University within an hour.

“My parents wanted to get there early so that I could claim the bottom bunk,” she said. “They thought I would roll off the top bunk."

Kozak said her parents were pleased she was assigned a single room.

Hillevi Gustafson also struggled with jet lag. She left her home in Sweden two days before the program. She spent an hour and a half on a train to reach the airport in Denmark and arrived in Chicago nine hours later, with a seven hour time difference.

“Everything ran pretty smoothly with no delays,” Gustafson said. She spent a few days with a family friend who lives 45 minutes away from campus, trying to recover from the jet lag.

Taylor Long, of Indiana, Pa., drove 10 hours with her parents and encountered a hail storm just as they reached their hotel.

Nate Zemanek took a five-hour train ride from his home in Midland, Mich., with his mother and grandmother.

“The only difficult part about the trip was my grandmother having to lug her suitcases up the stairs of the train station,” he said.

DeVaney said having family nearby made the decision to attend the program easier.

“It's what I really wanted to do this summer,” DeVaney said.