Marcin is a visual learner. He pays careful attention to how things look in order to gather clues about what things are. His powers of observation were put to the test as he considered his college choices. "I had to make the decision with the College of the Atlantic catalogue in my hand-the pictures in the catalogue played a huge role. They were different-they were UWC-like. I remember one of the notice boards from the dining hall with messages about concerts, meetings, groups-it was a community board. Also in that catalogue there was a bunch of pictures of students talking with teachers, chilling together. When I think of other colleges' catalogues, they were about "the big": big buildings, libraries, teachers in fancy offices. COA students in their groovy clothes, sitting on the red bricks attracted me. Expressions on their faces mattered, because a decision to come to study in the USA was a decision about how my life would look; it was not only an educational choice.

"Another factor, more trivial but important was the island. It sounded-and looked in pictures-romantic and magical, and it has proved to be so. The final thing to which I paid attention, perhaps most important, was the fact that the college has less than 300 students.  I simply liked the fact that I would know people around me and vice versa."

Marcin recognizes that some may consider COA's size and location to be socially limiting and he has a thoughtful rebuttal for such an assumption. "Graham Greene said quite wisely that even if you live in a big city, it is in the end about a few streets, a few houses and a few people that matter to you. All that is to be found here in Bar Harbor."

If a student seeks a broader set of experiences than can be found in Bar Harbor, it is easy to engage in opportunities across the United States and around the world. Marcin chose to focus on the study of ethnography and international public health policy. His studies took him from a Washington DC internship at the Student Global AIDS Campaign to a senior project in Kenya. He participated in COA's study abroad program in the Yucatan and organized the Maine Student Conference on Global AIDS.

After four years at COA, Marcin believes that the flexible educational approach that COA encourages is as important as the settings where the studying takes place. "Learning under the umbrella of Human Ecology is a process of trials, failures and successes, because Human Ecology gives the student freedom of choice. As much as that freedom  of choice might be something obvious to students from the West, to me it has been a gift. Thanks to that freedom I could get a taste of economics, law, guitar, conflict resolution, photography, creative writing, ethnography, and political philosophy. For four years I could try all these things, see what I like and what I don't, what I am good at and what I should never touch again. That freedom of choice that Human Ecology gave me has been at the same time a privilege and a burden. It has been a burden because it forced me to make decisions about my life; it gave me a responsibility over my own actions. Sometimes I wished I had been enrolled at a 'regular' university. It could have been simpler but would I feel fulfilled,  not having the power to really determine the course of my education?"