When Mia Tyler arrived in the Village of Gambier in 2001, she got "that feeling you're supposed to get: That you're where you are meant to be." For Tyler, that was a close-knit community similar to her hometown of Readville, Maine, where she could learn and make a difference.

With a major in political science and a concentration in women's and gender studies, Tyler puts her studies into action, mentoring first-year women, serving on the College's sexual misconduct task force, and co-organizing the spring Take Back the Night events.

Tyler chose to spend her junior year in Berlin to study at Humboldt University and to show herself that the village girl could make it in an urban, international environment. Her need to make a village, though, led Tyler to volunteer at a community education center for Turkish immigrant women. She reaped enormous intellectual and personal benefits, gaining first-hand experience of integration politics and the issues for Muslim women moving into a secular environment.

Her connections at the Turkish center in Berlin brought Tyler a chance to travel to Istanbul for five weeks. She used her German to meet people through the local Goethe Institute, and she studied Turkish. "I was completely blindsided by the whole experience," she marvels. Now she knows Turkey is somewhere in her future.

In the meantime, as Tyler's world expands, Kenyon is the perfect place to come home to, to integrate the experiences of the year away through study and action.