Do you ever wonder what it would be like to live on a cruise ship for a whole semester?

Semester at Sea (SAS) is a college study abroad program that takes classes and puts them on a ship!  Students get the chance to explore a variety of countries all over the world.  It’s a one of a kind experience and thankfully OU is one of the universities that allows class credits to transfer over from SAS.

Former OU student, Shelby Stillwell, attended the Semester at Sea program last semester and explored over 12 cities in 112 days.  The experience was indescribable.   But thankfully, Shelby collaborated with The Odyssey to describe in her own words what it was like living on the ship, sailing country to country and experiencing a real life Suite Life on Deck. 

Shelby Stillwell's experience from her perspective:

In January, I boarded my new home, the M.V. Explorer.  After so many years of dreaming about the program, the ship felt instantly familiar, in the best way.  We pulled away from the shore at sunset, and we headed west, to Asia. 
   

Cell phones don’t work out in the middle of the ocean, and we had extremely limited Internet time, so from day one we all had to “unplug.”  Instead of Facebooking, we had face-to-face conversations, played board games, and explored the ship via hide-and-seek.  It was incredible how quickly we all bonded this way.  
                            

The shipboard community consisted of five hundred students, including activists and artists, entrepreneurs and med students, as well as professors, their children, and more than sixty “lifelong learners”—voyagers over the age of forty who were along simply for the educational and mentorship opportunities.  Everyone on board was passionate about something, and the energy was unbelievable.           
                       

I befriended my neighbor, Dawn, an adrenaline junkie biomedical engineer from Ohio, and we decided to travel together in Japan.  Dawn, her friend Rebecca (a Canadian who literally grew up in a town with polar bears), and the pop-culture-savvy librarian’s assistant Francesca, became my core travel group.  
                          

 Once we hit Japan, we began our whirlwind of country visits—six days on land, two or three at sea, then six days in the next place.  One of our first adventures was navigating the Tokyo subway system, which felt like being in a child’s virtual reality.  The different platforms were labeled with cartoon animals, like dolphins and bunnies, and a cutesy jingle played over the intercom every time a train arrived.       
                       

Next, we went to China, and then to Vietnam.   I was blown away by Vietnam.  The people were incredibly kind, and the coffee was phenomenal.  One day in Ho Chi Minh City, some friends and I went to a tailor and searched through piles of fabric and style magazines to design dresses that we had custom-fitted to our measurements. 
              

After Vietnam was Singapore, and then Burma.  Burma was the most exciting country for me, because it was the one I had researched most at OU. Until the past few years, Burma’s military dictatorship had banned any outsiders from visiting, but radical change has been happening lately. The week we arrived in the capitol city, the unearthly beautiful country had just been officially granted freedom of the press.              

After Burma we went to India, Mauritius, South Africa, and then Ghana. My acting class had a “field lab” in Ghana—essentially, we learned to drum and dance on the beach for five hours and got college credit for it. As we passed through town, we marveled at the curious names of local shops, including “Blood of Christ Hair Salon” and “Jesus is Lord Supermarket.”  
                  

I rounded out the voyage with a camel trek through the Sahara Desert in Morocco, before debarking in London, England and hopping over to Italy to visit some friends in Arezzo.