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Students
who participate in MICAS go to Mexico for six to eight weeks on average
and stay in a town of 30,000 called Valladolid. They live in stone
houses that have running water and plumbing, but sleep in hammocks because
it's too hot to sleep in beds. With funding provided by a National
Science Foundation grant, the students receive room, board, and about a
hundred dollars a week in spending money.
"It's hard work. It's serious work," says Bey. "You cannot participate in this program if you think it is some kind of vacation. Our work at Ek Balam involves very important archeological research, and the dedication level that it demands is pretty high. But it's a lot of fun too. On the weekends the students can go off to Cancun, while I'm still in the lab!" Ali Waid, a 1995 Millsaps graduate who is now pursuing a doctorate at the University of Albany, remembers her MICAS experience with pride. "It was a good experience in terms of what it's really like to practice anthropology. The work was very difficult. We were there with graduate students, which could be intimidating." When MICAS is fully operational, people back home will be able to share in the learning fun as well. Bey describes plans to develop a "distant learning module" that could be accessed by high school students in Mississippi. "As we dig the building, we would share information with high schools over the internet. Sometimes these would be live broadcasts, sometimes they would be archives available on our website. We would update our progress as we went along. Someone would film our work and we would explain it as we did it. Students back home could actually watch us on the site. It would be interactive, as well, with a chat room where the high school students could ask questions of our Millsaps team." In this way, Millsaps will bring archeology and Mayan culture to Mississippi. The experience of engaging in archeology could be shared not only with high school students but with adult education classes as well, providing students of all ages with a realistic and exciting picture of what archeology is all about. "The point is to change the way students think about archeology and the past," Bey states. Furthermore, Millsaps students would not only be practicing archeologists, they would be teachers of archeology as well. This added dimension of MICAS produces Millsaps graduates who are formidably equipped for graduate school and the professional world. "Our students do very well when competing for graduate school," Bey affirms. "Aside from the hands-on experience that MICAS gives them, our classes are seminars. Students learn to speak up and assert themselves in a way that benefits them." MICAS also tends to fortify friendships between students and to lead to new friendships between students and Latin Americans. Given the United States' new commitment to trade and cultural exchange with Latin America, such cross-cultural opportunities are timely. PREVIOUS PAGE | PAGE 3 OF 5 | NEXT PAGE |