This morning while thousands of Duke students trudge across campus to their morning classes, juniors Aaron Jones and Sandra Mullins will roll out of bed and into their seminar seats without allowing their feet to touch the ground.
They are not flying through Durham-they are sailing across the Atlantic Ocean with 600 students from around the country on board Semester at Sea's floating campus, the S.S. Universe Explorer. The ship's facilities include classrooms with closed circuit television, a library, a computer lab, a theater, a student union, two dining rooms, a swimming pool, a volleyball court and a fitness center.
"The concept dates back to 1927 when a group of 500 students affiliated with New York University traveled to 35 countries on a passenger ship for six months," said Paul Watson, director of enrollment management for the Institute for Shipboard Education, which has operated the program for the last 25 years.
Along with academic sponsor University of Pittsburgh, the non-profit organization has allowed over 35,000 students to spend a semester of their undergraduate education traveling the high seas.
"Instead of becoming familiar with one place, your broaden your global awareness," said Trinity junior Regan Lyons, who passed on a traditional study-abroad experience to visit ten ports in countries including Vietnam, Malaysia, India and Kenya while on Semester at Sea last fall.
Students attend classes every day the ship is at sea. On each voyage, faculty from a variety of schools teach more than 70 classes from an international perspective with a comparative format.
"Students are able to interact with faculty outside of the classroom; they live together on the boat," said Watson. "They develop relationships that transcend what is possible on campus."
When the ship completes its current-ten day
"You truly get a taste and great feel for ten completely different cultures, particularly if you take advantage of the 'home-stays' facilitated by Semester at Sea or spend time with university students," Mullins wrote in an e-mail. "Through interaction with the local people, you gain a different perspective from that you would get of any given city by merely taking a guided tour."
After spending a semester on a study-abroad immersion program in Spain, Mullins choose Semester at Sea for the wider range of enriching experiences it would provide. "I'm all about diversity: was born in Spain, grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, have an American father, Spanish mother, go to Duke, studied abroad in Madrid and now I'm participating in the Semester at Sea program, so it's something I tend to seek out."
The focus of the program is non-Western, Watson said. "Our goal is to prepare students for the global environment that we live in by allowing them to gain perspective on their own culture," he said.
"It definitely challenged a lot of my views about the world and my place in the world as an American," said Lyons. "I realized the planet we are living on is very small and limiting. I witnessed pollution I never imagined was possible, and I visited rain forests that were hardly in existence. I was hit over the head with the fast pace at which we are destroying the one planet we have."
Despite the global nature of Semester at Sea, the University considers it a domestic, and not a study-abroad, program. In order
"I understand the rationale behind that decision is the fact that it is a program that goes from port to port, and therefore is not a full immersion into any particular culture through the study-abroad experience," said assistant dean of Trinity College Margaret Riley. "Semester at Sea is more of a superficial experience. A superficial exposure to a country or a city doesn't provide in-depth awareness. It's the immersion experience that provides an in-depth awareness of a culture that helps in the development of global citizens."
However, Watson said that the claim that an immersion experience is the only valid study-abroad experience defies what 35,000 participants know.
"Its goals and objectives are different, but it is still a rich academic experience," he said.
Lyons said her sister went on the program eight years ago and had raved about it ever since, so she knew she had to go as well. "The exposure that Semester at Sea offers far surpasses anything you can learn here, and for that reason its hard to understand why they don't recognize the educational value of the program," she said.
Lyons did acknowledge that the program has a reputation as a "booze cruise" and a "floating mattress" from the exposure it received on MTV's Road Rules series, but said the series did not capture the essence of Semester at Sea. "If you want your experience to be getting drunk in every port, you can do that, but very few did that," Lyons said.
Semester at Sea teaches the joys of venturing out into new cultures, Mullins said: "It creates an awareness that there is a world outside of the United States that is just as precious and important as that that we're accustomed to."
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