UMPI makes learning an adventure Newcomers forgo classrooms for outdoor lessons in teamwork

PRESQUE ISLE – If college were this much fun, everyone would be doing it.

Then again, that’s the idea behind Adventure Weekend at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, where incoming students spent their first days on campus anywhere but in the classrooms.

“A big concern of new students is whether or not they will fit in when they move to a new place,” Kurt Hofmann, UMPI vice president of enrollment management and student services, said Saturday. “This weekend is designed to ease that transition and give them a chance to get to know each other and, more importantly, the faculty and staff.”

By having the university president lead a hike up an area mountain, a professor of social work guide a canoe trip, and the resident psychology professor lead a cycling trek around Presque Isle, Hofmann said the weekend “allows students to see faculty and staff out of the traditional classroom and university context.”

Such interactions, he said, foster improved relationships and rapport among students and faculty. “It’s pretty hard not to interact with each other on a four-mile hike,” Hofmann said.

University President Dr. Nancy Hensel was geared up and ready to go Saturday morning as she watched students prepare for the hike up a mountain in Aroostook State Park.

“This is a great way to connect with the students,” she said. “This really fits with our campus theme of ‘adventurous learning,’ whether it’s intellectually, culturally or in the outdoors.”

Learning, Hensel said, often involves taking risks, and those can be in the classroom or on the open trail.

“The students can see you can engage in these adventures, and that it can make life a richer experience,” she said.

Heading out the door with the students, Hensel added with a grin, “Plus, I really enjoy hiking.”

Real learning can take place in an environment that supports risk taking, Hofmann said, where students learn it is permissible to make mistakes.

“During our adventure weekend last year, some of the students made pottery,” he said. “I would have to say it was probably the worst batch of pottery ever produced on a college campus, but they had fun and learned making a bad piece of pottery was not the end of the world.”

Risks of another sort were going on at the UMPI ropes course, where Stephanie Speicher, director of the outdoor adventure program, had students tangled, swinging and scaling walls in various team activities.

“This is a great way to allow the students to meet and build the relationships that allow friendships to develop,” Speicher said. “They are taking healthy risks in a controlled environment.”

In one activity, Speicher had nine students stand on a small wooden platform and directed them to swing on a rope, one by one, over to a smaller platform, feet never touching the ground.

All the students had to end up on the smaller platform and remain long enough to sing the verse of one song.

Skeptical at first, the students eventually worked together to get everyone across, even when it meant having to place two of them on the shoulders of fellow students to make room on the platform.

“You really get to know people doing this,” Scott Carmean, a first-year student from Livermore Falls, said. “Stephanie [Speicher] told us you can learn more about a person from how they play in 10 minutes than you can in a whole year of conversation.”

Cooper King of Hancock agreed.

“This was cool,” he said. “It was a great way to learn about teamwork.”

In all, UMPI welcomed 250 new students to campus this weekend and kept them busy with outdoor activities, regional tours, crime-solving games, campus gardening and working with the school paper.

“Adventure has to be more than the outdoors,” Hofmann said. “It must be in the classroom as well, and our students are excelling in and out of the classroom.”