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Semester at Sea was founded in 1963 and has made 136 semester-long voyages. You can read about the history here. It started very rough with students sleeping in bunks on repurposed freight vessels surrounded by a lot of rust and ladders, though nowadays it’s quite cushy.
SAS is a partnership between the Institute for Shipboard Education and (ISE) and an academic institution (CSU since 2016) which offers academic content and credit. ISE contracts with a separate company that owns and operates the ship itself. ISE’s “home office” is in Loren Crabtree Hall on Center Ave, near the Fort Collins Community Gardens.
Here are some interesting(?) stats about the voyage:
- Full semester (15 weeks, 105 days)
- 50% of the days are at sea, 50% on land
- Classes, exams, etc only during sea crossings
- 5 or 6 days on land in each of 10 countries
- Many educational programs on land too
- Combine private travel, organized field programs, in each country
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| Many academic partners, amazing interport lecturers! |
Who's on the voyage?
- Between 500 and 550 students, mostly 19-20 years old
- Between 25 and 40 Lifelong Learners (LLLs)
- About 30 Faculty & 30 SAS Staff (collectively "staculty")
- Families of staculty, partners plus between 15 & 25 “ship kids”
- Voyage Leaders (Deans)
- "Interport Lecturers" (one or two on each crossing)
- About 200 officers & crew (they work for the Captain, not for SAS)
Our 30 faculty typically teach three classes each, and we offer about 70 different courses for CSU credit. They’re all “real” classes from the CSU Catalog, including lectures, homework, exams, final projects, and everything you’d expect from a college class. The ship is a repurposed small cruise ship with most public spaces converted to classrooms by adding desks, a whiteboard, and a big presentation screen.
Semester at Sea has had seven different university “academic partners” over the decades and has been headquartered at CSU since 2016. Negotiations are now underway for the program to move to Arizona State University, but nobody knows (or says anyway) if or when this might happen. It has to do with big donors. It’s good we’re sailing next year.
It’s “hard to get in” (academically competitive) to Semester at Sea as a student. The average GPA of our students is about 3.5, and they’re typically Juniors in college. They come from almost 200 different home institutions, mostly in the USA but maybe 10% from other countries. Most receive financial aid.
Quite a number of students clearly come from wealth and privilege. Some will fly off to fancy houses or stay in lovely resorts and party their voyage away. On the other hand, there are always many on full-ride scholarships who can’t afford to eat out in our host countries and stay on the ship to save money. Most students fall somewhere in between these extremes. There are also about 20 to 30 “gap year” students who’ve just finished high school.
The Voyage Leadership Team (VoLT) is comprised of an Executive Dean and Assistant, a Dean of Student Life and Assistant, and an Academic Dean. They meet every day with the Captain to manage stuff that happens along the way.
As Assistant Executive Dean, Jody Donovan will be The Voice (also known as “bing-bong”). Twice each day we will hear shipwide chimes followed by her dulcet tones making announcements.
There are also a bunch of Student Life staff (Resident Directors, RDs), each of whom supervises a large group of students in a part of the ship. We call these groups “Seas” and they are analogous to dorms on a land-based campus. You’ll hear students refer to their seas: Arabian Sea, Bering Sea, Red Sea, etc.
There’s also LifeLong Learner Coordinator (and assistant) who helps you out with questions or problems and manages daily activities for the LLL community.
