Verto Education – Start College in Fiji

The Verto team was very supportive and fun the entire semester, I had so many crazy and immersive experiences when we got to visit villages in Fiji and white water rafting in New Zealand. The classes and teachers were very interesting and informative. One of my favorite memories was being in Nausori village with my host family and learning all about the fijian culture and traditions. One day we woke up at sunrise and hiked to the top of the mountain with our host brother, on our last night there he took us to his farm and we had a bonfire on the edge of a cliff, it was one of the coolest things I've ever done.

I had already attended college for a year before I’m went on my Verto semester. The summer leading up to the semester took great preparation, for I have a lot of medications to handle due to being a heart transplant recipient. Nevertheless I was able to spend the 3 months in the beautiful South Pacific doing crazy things like bungee jumping and skydiving with no medical issues.
I would say that you have to be a very adaptable and patient person on this experiential learning journey. Most of the locations you go to are very rustic and remote. That be said these places offer any extreme amount of natural beauty and culture. Since it was such a small class size (13 students) we took the classes week by week, but it was sometimes hard to get work done with the amount of traveling we did. Often times during our down time we had to choose between doing work, catching up on sleep, or attending to our mental health. The semester was jammed packed with activity after activity, great meal after great meal, and kind and compassionate programs leaders that I am still in touch with today. I think about the everything that made that trip special to me on the daily. The strongest thing that I took away from my time in the South Pacific is having a better sense of the environment and cultural relativism.

My experience with Verto was extremely unique because it was the first semester ran in the South Pacific in Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. In Fiji, I experienced different cultures and ways of life that have impacted the way I view the world today and forever. The semester was filled with adventure and personal growth. I loved the experiential learning aspect of the trip- we were not sitting in classrooms but rather experiencing and learning at the same time. I learned a lot about the environment by actually putting myself in different settings and learning how to create a more sustainable world. I found that I gained so much knowledge about myself, my perspective on the world, and ultimate understanding of the universe.

I always have felt that I can really roll with a lot of changes. This trip has definitely assured this of myself in my own mind. Although the traveling was consistently long and arduous, to the best of my ability I kept a level head and allowed myself to enjoy everything that the trip had to offer. I have to say that I absolutely loved this trip, not only was the experience incredibly valuable, but it also changed many of my hopes and dreams for the future. Because of this trip I now want to go into an environmental field and maybe even become a Rustic Pathways leader for a few years. Overall though, the people are what made the trip. The leaders, teachers, and other students were all such amazing people who I hope to keep in contact with because without the amazing people, I doubt I would have been able to handle all that was Verto Education South Pacific.

This semester not only gave be the incredible opportunity to see the world, build relationships, and life experience, but gave me the educational side that most gap programs do not offer. This program gave me adventures such as sky diving, white water rafting, and meeting and learning about the indigenous people and their culture. Within this program, experiential learning was applied, and this gave me the opportunity to see the effects of global warming in person, and the visual of what I had been learning in class, seen in real life. While doing a reef survey on the island on Beqa in Fiji, I had reminded myself that this was my freshman semester of college! I would not trade this experience for the world, and will continue to recommend this program for years to come.

Our first leg of the program in Fiji was a little hard at first mainly because we were with new people, in a very new surrounding, and thousands of miles away from home - to many the first time being away for so long. Our program leader and our teachers worked with what they were provided and made the most of it although it was hard a times. Sometimes they didn't know what the schedule plan was because it was so fluid so coming up with a plan on the spot for that many kids is hard. The leads is so young and joyful that it made coping with the tough situations better, we saw him as more of a friend than our leader. The next two countries were more similar to the states so everything from the bat was a lot easier. We adjusted to our surroundings very well and were active and cooperative throughout the NZ and Australia. The key component to making this trip work so smoothly, however, were the two leaders Ben and Eliza who literally ran the show with a smile on their faces 24/7. They woke up hours before we did and planned our meals appropriately throughout the day and had sleepless nights some days to ensure that we had all that we needed the next morning. Not once did they complain, and very few times asked for our collaboration just so that we could have all the time to ourselves that we wanted.

Verto is a unique opportunity which allows young adults to travel while getting college credits at the same time. I got to explore parts of the world I wouldn’t have dream of seeing in Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia. The culture in these places made their mark on me; I gained different perspectives on my own life. Having a small group of around 13 students made the experience socially exhausting- yet VERY rewarding. I was glad that I was able to be comfortable with my classmates, privacy was something I realized I took for granted at home. Everyone is going on the same trip together, yet we all had different experiences. What could be better than getting college credits for doing field studies in places like the Great Barrier Reef? I learned a lot about the world, and myself, on this trip.