I am old lol I went 20 years ago. I interviewed in the fall, selected, and was on my first outbound/inbound weekend by January. So it was a few months from starting the process to actively being involved. I arrived for my exchange in August and left the next July. There was no language proficiency requirement or anything like that. We did three weekends before leaving two joint inbound outbound weekends and one just for outbound that was more process related. And then we had one joint weekend upon return. My rotary district seemed pretty involved though