How Semester at Sea Works

When I tell people I’m going on a cruise around the world for a semester, most people don’t believe me, or don’t understand how that’s possible. Well, I’m going to explain how it works. The program is called Semester at Sea, and it is run by the University of Virgnia.

Every semester, 700 undergraduates from around the US go on Semester at Sea. The ship used is the MV Explorer, which apparently is the fastest cruise liner in the world. The ship used to be owned by Royal Caribbean until Semester at Sea bought it a few years ago. Therefore, the ship has some of the same amenities as an actual cruise ship, which is awesome.

Academically, everyone on the ship takes 12 units, or 4 classes. At UofA, I take 5 classes (which is 15 or 16 units, depending on the classes I’m taking) each semester, so the course load on SAS is a little lower than what I'm used to. At sea, we have class almost everyday, and we are off every day we are at land. On the ship, everyone has to take a class called Global Studies. Unfortunately, this class is at 9:20 everyday we are at sea, which is obnoxious. I’m in college and don’t like waking up that early, haha. Okay, I’ll stop complaining, I shouldn’t complain about anything since SAS should be so awesome, even with class at 9:20 every day. However, I can guarantee SAS does that so they get everyone up early. Also, Global Studies is only 3 units but we have it everyday for 1:15, but we have all of other classes every other day for 1:15 and they count for the same as Global Studies. I don’t get why we have Global Studies for double the amount of time as the other classes when they all count for the same amount of units, but I’m sure there is a good reason for it. Global Studies, from what I’ve heard, just covers the countries we are going to, so it should be interesting.

Besides Global Studies, I’m taking 3 classes. Two of the classes, US Foreign Policy and Political Economy of Development, count for my Political Science major, while my other class, Cultural Geography, counts for my Geography minor. Since I really liked almost every Political Science class I've taken (and the one I didn‘t like had a terrible teacher and was probably the most disorganized class I‘ve ever taken), I’m sure I’ll like the ones I’m taking, they sound really interesting to me and I like practically anything that's Poli Sci. Also, one thing that SAS does that’s really cool is that every class has a field component. That means for each class, 20% of the grade is based on research you do in each country, which I think is cool since it lets us connect what we are learning in class to where we are going. So yeah, that's pretty much how SAS works.....less than 3 weeks until I actually go