More than 500 students, faculty, and staff of a ‘university at sea’ will arrive in the city this morning for a one day exploration of Galway before also docking in Dublin.

The members of the Semester At Sea (SAS) group are circumnavigating the globe aboard the 24,300-ton campus of the MV Explorer, and its first stop since departing from Halifax will be Galway this morning, including one student from NUI Galway, Sarah Cosgrove, who joined the shipboard community in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where embarkation took place on August 23.

Semester at Sea is a global study abroad programme that traces its roots to 1963. Participants, who hail from more than 250 universities around the world, circumnavigate the globe aboard the ship while attending classes in a closely-knit environment with an international faculty, complete fieldwork and travel while in port, and receive course credit from the University of Virginia, the academic sponsor.

As well as stops in Ireland, the ship will also dock at England, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Ghana, South Africa, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Dominica before returning to Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA in December. This is the 111th voyage of Semester at Sea.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.