Personal Leadership

The Scholar Ship offers students a uniquely exciting, life-changing, richly complex, and culturally dynamic learning experience. Friendships are formed that continue life-long, and interests are focused in ways that direct future careers. To help students integrate their experiences and make meaning of them, The Scholar Ship teaches students the two principles and six practices known as Personal Leadership.

Personal Leadership is a state of mind, of heart, and of body, which means it is more than an intellectual exercise. It describes a way of being and of interacting with the world that begins from the “inside out,” and that asks us to be fully present in our lives, awake to our habitual behaviors, and willing to look at every situation with fresh eyes, with “beginner’s mind.”

To be effective across cultural difference requires exactly this quality of personal and professional commitment. Difference appears in our lives in so many different situations -- when we move to a new country or community, start a new project, start a new relationship -- any time we are engaged in transition and are confronted by the new and unfamiliar. Aboard The Scholar Ship, Personal Leadership exists for the expressed purpose of helping students step directly into, discover, and then leverage the creative potential inherent in all such experiences of difference.