Students attend lectures aboard the ship and visit 10 different countries in a semester's time. This fall, the program's ports of call will include Kobe, Japan; Chennai, India; Istanbul, Turkey; Dubrovnik, Croatia; and Cadiz, Spain. The program costs between $17,000 and $30,000, depending on room choice.
The ship hosts a tiny library of about 8,000 volumes of books tailored to global studies, history, travel and world cultures. But with a student ID, undergrads and faculty can tap into the digital library of the University of Virginia, which, in partnership with Google, is currently working on a project to digitize books in the public domain. For now, students can access more than 300 full-text and index databases of books and papers, including LexisNexis and Elsevier's Science Direct service.
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