Interport lecturers and students are a fantastic resource for the Semester at Sea community. They join us at different points along the journey to help prepare us for what we will encounter in upcoming destinations. In most cases, those interport lecturers and students will be residents of the country that we are going to visit. However, in the case of Spain, we are lucky enough to have UVA Spanish professor David Gies along with us until we reach Cadiz on Wednesday.In addition to being a seasoned professor, an expert in his field, well published, and a great lecturer as our shipboard community can now attest to, Professor Gies, or should I say Sir David, is also a recipient of The Cross of Isabel the Catholic, Spain’s highest cultural achievement distinction for foreign nationals, making him a bona fide Spanish knight.
Following last night’s Explorer’s Seminar, during which Professor Gies gave us some great tips for Spain that I will be sharing with you all in a separate post, I had the opportunity to sit down with him and learn more about his relationship with Semester at Sea and his thoughts about the program.
David first became a part of Semester at Sea when the University of Virginia became the academic sponsor in 2006. He served as the academic dean on UVA’s maiden voyage in the summer of 2007, a role that he will be filling again in the fall of 2010. When UVA took over as the academic sponsor, David explained that he felt “the mission was to ratchet up academic improvement and the academic experiences in-country.” As academic dean, he sought to improve the courses offered and move their syllabi more towards those offered on the Charlottesville campus. In selecting professors, he searched for those that were engaged intellectually in their fields, published, received awards, and probably most importantly, he sought professors that were superb teachers.
I was also curious to know how David felt SAS compared to other study abroad programs. The Semester at Sea experience is unique in that it offers a “range of opportunities to participate in a global environment,” David responded. Students can compare and contrast firsthand the different peoples, languages, and cultures that they will encounter during their journey. This is a serious academic undertaking and in David’s words, Semester at Sea is for those who will “take this seriously as an academic experience, for they will surely gain a deeper and richer understanding of the world.”
Photo by SAS Photographer John Weakley
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