Megan McIlroy, The Examiner
2007-07-09 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

ST. MARY'S CITY, Md. -

Many misconceptions are floating around about St. Mary’s College of Maryland on the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland.

For starters, some think it’s an all-girls Catholic school.

In fact, St. Mary’s is the state’s smallest public school, and it has been Maryland’s designated honors college since 1992. That means it attracts some of the region’s top students while remaining accessible to a diverse group of Marylanders.

“Liberal arts colleges [are usually] a bubble,” said recent graduate Erica Katherine Schuetz, 21. “But St. Mary’s has a different kind of diversity that I valued so much as a student.”

Shane Hall, 19, a junior, said the college has the reputation of a hippie, party-school, a tag he says is outdated.

“We have a laid-back campus,” he said. “But we do have a lot of work.”

Caring for the environment is important at St. Mary’s, and last spring students approved an initiative for the school to purchase renewable energy credits in an effort to neutralize the college’s carbon output. Remarkably, students voted to increase their own fees to pay for the initiative.

“We were shocked,” said Hall, one of the student leaders who pushed St. Mary’s to go green. “We didn’t think people would really want to pay any more money. It showed that our students do care about global warming and the environment.”

Another common thread for St. Mary’s students is the itch to travel. About 52 percent of students study abroad, said Jane Margaret O’Brien, the school’s president.

“I think [traveling] is a growing thing at St. Mary’s. I met an amazing number of people there who are just adventurers,” said Schuetz, who traveled to Thailand, Austria and Germany as an undergraduate.

Hall agrees, saying he caught the travel bug after visiting Costa Rica and Chile. He plans to study in Africa next year.

“It’s the most fun, and there’s nothing more essential to understanding the rest of the world than traveling,” he said.

O’Brien said St. Mary’s goal is that within three years all students will have at least one abroad experience before they graduate.

mmcilroy@baltimoreexaminer.com