Annual Report & Year in Review

Photo of Kim Nolan '16
Photo of Kim Nolan ’16

The Global Explorer

Kim Nolan ’16

About

“As an environmental studies major, the trek to the highest reaches of Cajas was an academic pursuit I had long dreamed about,” says Kimberly Nolan ’16.

“The mountain reserve is home to 19 endemic species of plants found nowhere else in the world. I had spent hundreds of hours back in Pennsylvania studying how invasive plant life could wreak havoc on an ecosystem. The damage of such an emergence of flora here, in such a remote pocket of South America, would be catastrophic.” But study abroad is much more than just field work, and she knows this firsthand. “During my six months in Quito, Ecuador, I visited 16 cities, worked in a special-needs orphanage, dared to do things like bungee jump, and took five classes entirely in Spanish at a liberal arts university more than five times the size of my close-knit Ursinus. It took 45 minutes—and 25 cents—to ride the bus to campus.”

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