Changing lives, one big trip at a time

“Travel,” Mark Twain once wrote, “ is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Twain, a world traveler of some renown and a pretty fair writer in his time, had it about right we think. Travel changes people, makes them better.

At Francis Marion University, we embrace this notion and work hard every year to send students and faculty scurrying across the country and around the globe, rather than vegetating in our little corner or the earth, no matter how pleasant we often find it.

FMU has exchange partnerships with dozen of colleges in Europe and Canada, and we’re working to find more all the time. We send students into the foothills of the Andes Mountains every year at the Wildsumaco Biological Research Station, which we co-operate with two other universities. And, through programs like FMU Honors and the Model United Nations we transport groups around the country on excursions that broaden the mind and produce a lifetime of memories.

Lots of resources go into these trips, but we think it’s worth it.

The chance to change a life, to shape a future, can hardly be quantified. 

That is the mission of a great university, of course.