Instinctively, it is difficult to get excited about spending over three months in the desert. It’s dry, it’s hot, and it just doesn't seem to be a good place to spend any period of time, let alone an extended one.
Get ready to change your mind!
The Grand Canyon Semester, an experiential learning program offered through Northern Arizona University, might just be the best-kept secret in American academia. The extremely low-residency program focuses on exploration, adventure, and community as learning tools, and the experiences that I personally racked up during my all-too-short time in Flagstaff have taught me an indescribable amount.
I spent most of my undergraduate career at the Johns Hopkins University, which is located in Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore is a big, dirty, east-coast city. There are many things to love about the place, and love it I did, but after three years I began to itch for something new – something away. An honors society that I had joined sent me an email containing a link to the GCS homepage. I clicked on it. The rest is history.
I had always loved the American West in some capacity – the open skies, skiing in Colorado. I had never seen the Grand Canyon, nor had I ever been to Arizona prior to GCS. So when I was led, blindfolded, to the rim of the Canyon, I had a vague expectation of grandeur and beauty. When I was made to see, what I saw literally took my breath away, and cemented the place in my heart as a destination that lives and breathes within me. As dramatic as that sounds, there is simply no other way to describe my relationship with the Arizona wilderness after having experienced it through the Grand Canyon Semester.
Since high school I’ve been avidly outdoorsy – to appreciate all that GCS has to offer, one shouldn’t mind getting a little dirty. Or perhaps a lot dirty, depending on what the day or the trip has in store. From scrambling into caves to wading around in the Colorado River, there can be no doubt that this is a hands-on program. Experiential learning is an interesting and relatively modern school of thought that asserts that learning by doing is just as good as, and probably better than, learning simply by third-party research, memorization, or other traditional forms of education. GCS takes experiential education and fuses it with classroom courses to form an integrated, best-of-both-worlds program that involves both traditional research and complete immersion.
From geography to politics, GCS is a thorough exploration of both the scientific and cultural aspects of a fascinating and often mysterious landscape. The faculty is unsurpassed, and the almost one-to-one ratio of faculty to students makes for a unique and personal learning experience. The faculty’s devotion to its students is incredible. From camping to dining to random field trips, GCS students and faculty become a true community – a situation unlike any other in undergraduate education. I have nothing but the fondest memories of all of my teachers at NAU, and truly feel as if I have gotten to know them better in three months than many people I have known for years.
Retrospectively, it is actually very difficult to write about GCS now that I am not an active participant. I find that it is nearly impossible to retell with any accuracy the views, the adventures, even the classroom experience. Perhaps that’s not entirely true – some of the silly things are easy to talk about. I can remember the desert snowball fights (Flagstaff, being situated at 7,000 feet, has both cactus and snow). I can remember two ravens working as a pair, like sneaky little children, to steal my Snickers bar from under my nose while I laid on a beach on the Colorado River. (I only had one Snickers bar. This was sort of upsetting.) But can I describe the intense feeling of camaraderie that developed, surely and steadily, over the course of the semester? Or the pure quiet of North Canyon in the blue light of early morning? Not in any way that truly conveys my feelings on the matter. Many of these things are simply beyond words.
I see the desert in and entirely new light now. My final project for the Grand Canyon Semester was a small collection of poems, written entirely on my travels in the Canyon and surrounding areas. Shockingly, I actually liked how they turned out. Living and breathing the American Southwest has opened my eyes to an entirely new universe of poetic possibility that has been, in reality, lurking under my nose my entire life. Not only has the desert helped me to articulate the grand in Nature, it has also made me appreciate the tiny, and the dull, and the everyday miracles that we completely take for granted. When these arid regions speak, they flood the mind – which is, of course, perfectly in character for the desert. Never do anything halfway.
The Grand Canyon Semester, as all wonderful academic endeavors should, has added a further degree of beautiful strangeness to my college experience. I have seen Nature as raw power and subtle beauty, humans as monsters and gods, the planet as fragile and endlessly resilient. The Grand Canyon Semester has taught me more about myself and the world around me than I ever thought I would learn in one semester. When we are in college, we almost forget to truly explore, and adventure is truly the stuff of life. I would encourage anyone who is at all interested in the unique and fascinating culture, politics, and landscape of the American Southwest to apply for this program. There is nothing else like GCS.
