Gap year programs are a central component of the Castle Rock Institute. We sponsor several semester-long adventure travel opportunities that combine a range of outdoor adventure activities and university-level courses in the Humanities. We offer truly unique gap year programs.

The Castle Rock Institute is an wilderness center affiliated with Brevard College. It seeks applications from students and professors from the United States and abroad to live, study and experience the outdoors together. Housed in a lodge set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, the Institute aims to enliven the study of the Humanities through interdisciplinary classwork, cross-cultural experience and through organized group adventure activities. The Castle Rock Institute is dedicated to gap year programs, to investigating links between scholarship in the Humanities and the practical dimensions of human life in the natural and social world.

CRI encourages interdisciplinary thought and intellectual experimentation by focusing each semester on a particular issue, idea or theme drawn from the Humanities. This theme serves as the main topic of discussion and area of research throughout the semester.

All CRI students enroll in four courses taught by Institute Senior Fellows. Each course meets regularly throughout the semester and awards four hours of academic credit. Students also spend several full and half days per week participating in small group activities like rock climbing, backpacking, and paddling. The Institute strives to balance and integrate scholarship and adventure, and believes that doing so makes both all the much better.

Different from the historical approach of many university Humanities programs, the Castle Rock Institute curriculum is organized thematically. Instead of sweeping through a series of "great books," all of the courses offered at the Institute revolve around a single issue, idea or theme drawn from the Humanities. Accordingly, each class explicitly considers how insights offered by other academic disciplines can contribute to an overall understanding of the theme at hand. For example, a semester devoted to the notion of "community" may consider how the use of masks in African religious rituals or how French Existentialist conceptions of self can inform a Jane Austen novel, or can affect the composition of a painting or pencil sketch.

Castle Rock Gap Year Programs for Students

As a complement to its academic mission, the Castle Rock Institute organizes for its residents a variety of outdoor adventure activities. The Institute takes seriously the idea that there is a fundamental connection between body and mind, between lived experience and the more abstract, theoretical concerns of the intellect. It sees, in other words, a mutually reinforcing relationship between direct and intense contact with the natural world and the scholarly goals central to the Humanities. Focusing on meaningful expressions of this relationship, our gap year programs challenge students to find a balance between real life and their studies.

A typical day of gap year programs at the Castle Rock Institute combines individual study, classroom learning, and opportunities for experiencing the natural world. Just imagine, one morning you will wake up, and after a hot breakfast, spend a few minutes preparing for the day's class. You might need to finish up some reading or polish a group presentation you're doing with a couple of other students. You'll spend a few hours in class discussing assigned readings, listening to a faculty lecture, or perhaps a guest speaker. After lunch, everyone will gather gear for a short mountain bike or rock climbing trip. Or, this may be a chance for you to work out on the climbing wall, or just to take a quiet walk in the forest. Back in time for a late dinner, you'll have free time afterwards to work on your class readings or studio art assignments, head into town for a movie, or just relax with a friend. Very different from most other gap year programs!