Advice for faculty going on Semester at Sea

• Faculty members with families should definitely ship a VCR in the faculty shipment to keep any little ones occupied during pre-port meetings or wavy times that take your energy away.
• Don't believe that you will have large blocks of time to catch up on big projects. The schedule includes a huge number of optional (and mandatory) informational, cultural, and even social meetings. The tired feeling you will have even if you don't get seasick will increase the number of hours sleep needed nightly by a couple of hours per night.
• Workspace is at a premium, so it will be somewhat difficult to become comfortable unless you're one of the lucky ones with a TV mounted from the ceiling so your desk can be used as a desk! If you get a room with a TV bolted to the desk, ask at the Purser's desk if they can mount it on the ceiling like it is in many rooms.
• Flexibility is the key. Be willing to make changes when you find 75% of your students out seasick, when an FDP gets fouled up by something beyond your control, or when a student has to be flown somewhere for an emergency appendectomy! But be careful here, because students learn about the faculty's flexibility and can take advantage of it. You need to keep your ears and eyes open.
• Make sure you take deductions for late FDPs. Some students write them up near the end of the course even if they didn't attend at all. They get details from their buddies and write them up. I didn't realize this until the end, and would have come up with a plan for providing assurance that they did. Early on, students will be honest, but later some will take shortcuts. Perhaps grade them only in batches or come up with a creative plan to make sure only students who attended get credit. One important aid here is to allow students to create their own independent projects if they would like. This will cut down on their frantic need to throw something together or to cheat.
• Think about taking a hot pot with some Ramen noodles. If you are a vegetarian, you'll find too many repetitive meals, and the variety will be welcome. I'm not a vegetarian and I loved the meats and sauces on the ship, but one daughter became a vegetarian on the ship for a couple of weeks and the kids needed filling snacks when they slept in or became seasick. Note: both on the ship and in ports, it seems that chefs/cooks don't trim fat from meat very well.
• Take lots of items you can use as gifts. We bought about 10 Pitt t-shirts (including 2-3 in childrens' sizes, too) and got some free souvenirs (paperweights, zipper bags, keychains) that the department gave me. We needed more, so we bought some SAS souvenirs.
• Spend lots of time developing your FDPs. They really put things together for me, and helped integrate my courses with the world we were going to see. Do everything you can to find contacts in those countries who can accept a group of students and give them a tour of their facility. Explore possibilities for an exciting assignment for students for their visit. Give students a variety of ways in which they can earn their 20 points so that you don't have dozens of students at your door saying that there was no room in the FDP.
• When you grade FDPs, keep track of who did what so that if students accidentally (or otherwise) turn in the same one again, you have a record of what they turned in.
• Take a power strip because there is probably only one outlet available in your entire room!