A semester on an island in the Indian Ocean sounds glamorous. But Hans Van Der Sande’s co-op in the Republic of Seychelles, an archipelago nation over a thousand miles off the coast of Africa, was a lesson in conservation.

Van Der Sande, a senior ecology and evolutionary biology major, has been interested in conservation work since he took a gap year interning at a resort in the Philippines and ended up involved in a research project in which he dived three times a day monitoring the local coral population.

“I had a passion for conversation and I still think that’s very important,” he said. “I wanted to pursue it in different ways.”

Van Der Sande ended up getting his co-op at Fregate Island in Seychelles thanks to his previous experience living and working on an island and his diving certificate, which he got when he was younger. They enabled him to help with a marine project tracking coral growth during his time on co-op.

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Illustration by Renee Zhang