By Khalida Sarwari
While many of her fellow graduating high school seniors in Saratoga are either planning a celebratory trip or already basking on an exotic beach somewhere, Cameron Shetler can’t wait to come home for the summer.
It will be a much-needed break for Shetler, who has seen her fair share of markets, ruins and exotic cities over the past four years as part of her traveling high school.
Shetler recently received an international baccalaureate diploma from THINK Global School, a unique school that allows students to study abroad at host schools in a new city every semester. It’s unique also in the sense that students, faculty and staff in the program come from around the globe. The school was founded by photographer Joann McPike, who is from New Zealand but now considers herself a global citizen.
Shetler’s family learned about the school through family friends. After applying and getting through the screening process, Shetler, who was 14 at the time and a product of the Cupertino Union School District, jumped on a plane with her parents to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to start her four-year adventure.
“We wanted Cameron to be in an environment that allowed her to grab hold of life and make it hers,” said her father, Brian Shetler.
Shetler spent her first year trekking through Bhutan, where she heard officials talk about their measurement of gross national happiness. She then spent the winter and spring semesters in Boston, where she experienced a real northeastern winter but also got to witness domestic terrorism when the Boston Marathon bombing occurred only two blocks from her house. That day, she was working as a volunteer with her school at the marathon.
“It was eye-opening to have a terrorist incident at home in the U.S.,” she said.
Her sophomore year took her to Hyderabad, India. There she visited the Pakistan border and toured tea plantations and bustling cities. While most of her peers were preparing for multiple-choice exams, Shetler’s midterm involved safaris and hiking to mountainous lakes in Tanzania. That year, she also squeezed in skiing in Hiroshima, Japan.
Her journey continued the following year in New Zealand, where she canoed, then left for Costa Rica to study biology and surf, and ended in Athens, Greece, where she gave speeches.
Her final year of school took her into the arctic circle north of Stockholm, Sweden, and involved putting on an art show in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and traveling throughout Italy from Sardinia to Cinque Terre to Bologna. There were also side trips to Uruguay, Macedonia, Vienna and various countries in Africa.
Over the course of her studies, Shetler had the chance to debate democracy at the Parthenon in Athens, study biology in the Costa Rican rainforest and take in the Northern Lights from a dog sled in the Arctic Circle.
She got to share conversations with members of Argentina’s Guarani Indians, Tanzania’s Masai tribe, New Zealand’s Maori population and Sweden’s Sami people.
In India, she worked to better the lives of children in the slums of Hyderabad and in Moshi, Tanzania, she helped construct a schoolhouse for children in need. Shetler also served as a dance choreographer and fundraiser for a production that benefited Stockholm’s refugee population.
“Being a THINK Global School student, you are in a constant state of motion,” she said. “There really aren’t moments of stillness, unless you find them in chaos. I’m the most still in chaos, and that’s what I felt in India. I was in a chaotic bazaar and there were all these sounds, like auto rickshaws whizzing by, and I’ve never felt so still, and it was because I was completely in the moment.”
After clocking 60,000 miles, more than 15 countries and the satisfaction of living and learning on six continents, Shetler is back in Saratoga, but preparing to leave the country again, this time to China. She will be starting school this fall at New York University’s Shanghai campus.
The THINK Global School contributed to this report.
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