Study Abroad while Studying Abroad?!: My Experience with Semester At Sea

Have you all heard of Semester At Sea? It is a primary shipboard education community. If you have watched “Suite Life on Deck with Zach and Cody,” that is the life you get to live. Basically, you will travel by ship to about 12 different countries. While you are traveling, you take college courses.  Professors travel on the ship with you, and once you are on land, you will learn about the country, culture, and can travel to anywhere you desire within that country. I know, it sounds unreal. But it was! Is it considered a study abroad program? YES, IT IS!! You can transfer credits back to UCSB too. 


I spent a semester at sea during Fall 2019. The voyage sailed from the Netherlands to Poland, Portugal, Spain, Croatia, Morocco, Ghana, Brazil, Panama Canal, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and ended in San Diego. The voyage was three and a half months. The experience was amazing. I got to meet amazing people from all over the world! There were more than 400 students on my voyage and the majority of students were from the US, but there were many international students as well. There were about 27 nationalities on our ship. 


When I talk about this experience, I receive one question from all most everyone: “Which country was your favorite?”Honestly, every country was amazing in its own way, it is a difficult question. I always say, my favorite place to be was on the ship, and my favorite experience was the homestay I did in Ghana. 


The ship is just an amazing place to be. You get to know almost everyone on the ship somehow and you will see them around. When you go to the dining hall, you will find someone to sit with 100%. This is different from UCSB where it is difficult to run into all your friends because there are so many people. There is always something going on and you never get bored. The internet connection is very limited which allows you to have the most amazing conversations you’ve ever had.


In Ghana, I did a homestay and volunteered at an elementary school. It was an experience where I felt the most absorbed in the culture and could interact with local people. We danced together, played drums, and even took bucket showers in the dark. Everything was a unique and unforgettable experience for me. Learning about the education system in Ghana was very inspiring. It did not matter how many resources they had or what they did not have. What mattered was that they were growing as a human being. The students were eager to learn and were having the most fun learning. I have never seen students this motivated in school ever and it was very inspiring. I was honored to be able to help the teachers in the classroom and help them feed the two-year-olds. They were adorable. They had a student custom where they dance in the morning assembly to release the extra and negative energy. It was so much fun dancing with them as well. 


The most valuable lesson I learned during this voyage was that we need to learn from the locals. We should be careful about making assumptions about other cultures. During class on the ship, we discussed the analogy of the iceberg when considering others’ cultures. It inspired me to not take cultures at face value but to dig deeper so that I have a better understanding of each culture. The tip of the iceberg is the surface culture, and underwater, there is the bottom of the iceberg that is the deep culture. It taught me that in order to understand a culture thoroughly, I must peek under the iceberg and learn more about the culture. For example, in Croatia, I assumed that they enjoyed tourists and tourism because I felt so welcomed. However, some people had no choice but to join the tourism industry because they do not have other industries and they feel obligated. When I learned about other perspectives of the locals, I felt like I learned about the iceberg underwater: I went deeper into my observations and assumptions. It was a very awakening experience. 


Also, I learned how to be satisfied with myself. When 400 people are traveling in their separate ways, there are many places your friends visited but you could not visit. This increases your FOMO (Feeling Of Missing Out) and I began to feel jealous of people who did things I could not do in that country and forgot that I also experienced cool things. I was wrecking the value of my amazing experience by myself and it took a while to notice this bad habit of mine and to be happy and grateful with what I accomplished. 

If you’re considering Semester at Sea, feel free to reach out to me. I’d be happy to talk to you more about these experiences!


Here are some pictures and a self-introduction video I made for this program!!

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