Story by Katrina Altersitz
Illustration by Margaret Hall

When most 18-year-olds head off to college, they come from a routine—eight hours of classes, desks and books. At Maryland, freshmen are promised an escape.

Here, the President’s Promise gives every student at the university an opportunity to use their time to move beyond books and classrooms into the world around them, from hearing what they can do to proving they can do anything. These opportunities—these “non-book” classes—offer more knowledge than any textbook or formal lecture.

In the eyes of President C.D. Mote Jr., who himself has traveled to more than 40 countries, every student, no matter their major, should have the opportunity to immerse themselves in another culture.

An International Campus

Last winter, for Scott Jacoby, an aerospace engineering student, immersion meant not only sitting down with a man in Belize to discuss his job, family and artwork. It was also learning about the environment surrounding the College Park Scholars. They went to Mayan ruins, a jaguar preserve and Wee Wee Caye, “a dose of paradise,” Jacoby says.

He and his fellow students experienced Belize City, which “was different from any place I had stayed before,” he says. “It was a poor city; in some places, trying to modernize, but in many others, just holding on.” At the Mayan ruins, they had the chance to “run all over, climb up every temple and take a bazillion pictures and just inhale the place.” In Wee Wee Caye, they snorkeled in “another world underwater.”

Through the 10-day trip, the students involved themselves in their natural surroundings. They made presentations on native animals, searched for boas in the jungle and recognized that the size of hermit crabs’ claws correlate to the size of their shells.

“The trip was a tremendous opportunity to experience an area almost unlike any other in the world, enhanced by our teachers, the locals, the landscape, the animal life and the students,” Jacoby says.

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