Institute for Shipboard Education Monitoring India Attacks

Nov. 27, 2008: The Institute for Shipboard Education (ISE) is continuing to monitor the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. Semester at Sea is scheduled to visit Chennai, India—more than 1,000 miles southeast of Mumbai—in March 2009. No field excursions to Mumbai are planned. ISE works closely with senior security experts at the U.S. State Department as well as independent risk assessment agencies to carefully design itineraries that avoid areas of security concern. ISE will be assessing India as a whole, as well as Thailand, in the coming weeks.

Very often, political unrest and other security threats are isolated to a specific area of a country. As the Institute for Shipboard Education plans the SAS program, senior experts are careful to avoid areas of potential risk and can cancel field trips or change itineraries at any time. In this situation, the Institute will assess the impact of the event over the coming weeks and will make any necessary programming changes to ensure the safety of SAS participants. If anything should change, the Institute will immediately notify all Spring 2009 participants and their parents.