Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/641736
photography by nick manning. opposite page: by beth warsof (costa rica); nick manning (shunney, wyoming) The ultimate field trip! Winterline students travel all over the world, including to Estes Park, Colorado, home to the Rocky Mountain National Park headquarters, to learn wilderness first aid. Late night scuba diving in Panama, wilderness first aid in the Rockies, cooking in Cambodia, building robots in Germany… and there's still six countries to go, as well as some 96 more skills to learn. This is a new kind of school, kids. Head- quartered in Kendall Square, the Winterline Global Skills Program produces a nine-month gap year for high school graduates and college students. Its curriculum? Real life. Its classroom? The planet. Its purpose, via a non-curricular education, is to provide students a grade-A schooling on how to succeed in life—a goal that founder and serial entrepreneur Jeet Singh thinks colleges are getting all wrong. "If the purpose of higher education is to provide young people with the tools to be enlightened and engaged citizens, help them to find fulfilling and productive careers, and to give them the skills to succeed in an increasingly competitive and globalized world, then it's mostly been failing," says Singh, A SeriAl entrepreneur StAr offerS gAp-yeAr StudentS A new curriculum: reAl life. by lisa pierpont Mind the Gap scene travel 52 bostoncommon-magazine.com