Good Morning Travel Bugs!
When thinking about classes for your time with Semester at Sea, there are many factors that play in. One of the biggest is the required credits from one’s home university. As college is a stressful time and everyone is trying to gather credits in different areas of studies I have a few tips for choosing your classes.
These tips may take a bit of advanced planning but hopefully will be helpful and make your Semester at Sea experience enjoyable!
1. Plan ahead and leave electives for Semester at Sea
While this may not be achievable for many people, but it is a great thing to keep in mind if your voyage is a ways away. I knew that I would be doing Semester at Sea before I even signed up for college. I knew that if I didn’t do Semester at Sea I would for sure study abroad at some point. With this in mind, I decided to leave enough elective course spots in my schedule so that when the time came I was able to take classes that may not pertain to my major but I am highly interested in. I think this was one of the best decisions I’ve made because I was able to take classes such as Oceanography, Culinary Tourism, and Entrepreneurship, classes that did not relate to my major in any way. These classes were so much fun and I enjoyed showing up and having a bit of a change of pace for the semester. If you overload on business classes or whatever your major is, it will be a bit of a tougher semester balancing ship life, homework, and in-country travels. I understand that this may not be possible for everyone but it is one thing recommend if you can make it work.
2. Take the classes you are interested in
This is partially related to the first one but I think it is very important to build a semester that you will enjoy. It will make life on the ship a lot easier if you are taking classes that you are truly interested in rather than classes you are dreading. If you are a business major and you are really interested in international marketing and it fits into your required credits go for it. But, if have been dreading taking international marketing, save it for a semester at your home university. You will be glad you didn’t take a super hard semester of horrible classes. On gorgeous sunny days, you will want to spend time on the pool deck and not be stressing about classes you hate.
3. Look at the required field class
When choosing your classes the last thing that I believe is very important is the field class. If you are unaware, each class comes with a required field class. This means that for one-day in-country you will have to participate in the class. Along with this, you must be back on the ship the night before the class no later than midnight. When signing up for classes, it is not only important to keep this in mind because they can’t overlap with your other class but you want to plan then in countries you may want a day taken out of or one that is super interesting for you since it is covered by tuition. For example, I knew I wanted to take oceanography but there were three sections. I chose to do section 3 because the field class was snorkeling in Hawaii. How cool? On my voyage, there was a fuel stop in Hawaii and Mauritius meaning that you must have a program to get off the ship in this port so having a field class was really nice because I didn’t have to pay for a program to get off the ship.
While the field class is not the most important factor it is good to pick classes where you enjoy the day rather than dread the “wasted” time in-country. Also, be sure to look at the field classes required regardless because you can’t take two classes with the same field class date and may be in a bind when you go to sign up if you haven’t already laid the classes out.
4. Have Backups
Now, this is more of a must do than a guide for what classes to pick, but it is so important. High-demand classes such as Oceanography and other “fun” classes fill up within minutes of the course selection opening so be sure to have two or more backup options that can fit in your schedule if you don’t get into a certain class you were wanting. If you don’t plan out some backups and end up not getting into a course you may end up in something you really didn’t want because you will be wasting time searching for a backup when plan A didn’t work. When I laid out my schedule I had 4 different layouts of ways to make my favorite classes work. For example, if I didn’t get into a certain section I rearranged other classes to make the other section of one-course work. It made signing up for classes a lot less stressful.
This is also good to keep in mind for getting your classes approved by your home university. When I gave the list of classes to my college I had them approve 6 courses so when you I went to sign up if my top class was full I had a pre-approved backup!
5. Don’t Overload Yourself
While Semester at Sea makes you take 4 classes total (3 courses and Global Studies), they offer an option to take a 5th course if you get approval from your university. If this is not 100% necessary stick with the 4 courses. Ship life is so much fun and the last thing you will want is to be stuck in class doing homework on top of homework. The number of days I would have loved to just skip class and layout by the pool was way too many to count so don’t overload yourself!
I hope that this helped you when sifting through the long list of classes Semester at Sea offers. These tips can be hard for those who have limited options due to a rigorous schedule or strict transfer list but if you are able to be a bit flexible with your courses I highly recommend keeping these things in mind.
See You Soon!
xoxo Gina
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