When I first heard about Semester at Sea, I knew I wanted to do it. Questions, hesitations, and “back up” programs did not exist. Semester at Sea was it: my dream realized. I had never been on a boat for more than a few hours but had spent my life around water. I grew up a competitive swimmer, taught private lessons, and assistant coached our local swim team. For me, there was something about water that healed, inspired, and comforted. Living on the MV Explorer challenged me in ways that I have never encountered. I had never been sea sick or had to share and exist in a space that 650 other people call home. The world as I knew it had come from textbooks, movies, my laptop computer, and Animal Planet. The world as I know it now is a result of being a part of a shipboard learning community, encountering language barriers, tasting new foods, talking with the people I met, and living a life that had only existed for the characters in my favorite books.
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Some people have said that classes almost come secondary to traveling the world on a study abroad like this. But I saw how professors used our landscape to teach classes. I was exposed to truth through experience. The excitement of a shipboard education was inherent, because the culture of a group of people who want to learn by doing and not just by sitting in a classroom thrives on enthusiasm and wonder. This experience was one that I got to make uniquely my own from the classes I took to the places I visited in port. I walked in the footsteps of those who experience the sights, sounds, and smells of a unique time and place different from my own. I learned what it is like to live in a country whose citizens fish for their own dinner every night, to explore the castles and slave dungeons in Ghana, to simply be away from everything I have grown up knowing; to know and understand something else. To appreciate diversity not simply of race and religion but of culture and lifestyle. This is what Semester at Sea gave me as both a student and a citizen of the world.
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