If spending a semester hiking in rainforests, lounging on Hawaiian beaches or escaping the cold second semester by going to San Antonio, Texas sounds enjoyable, then consider attending one of University of Dayton's sister school's for a period of time.

The term sister school refers to the Marianist identity shared by UD, Chaminade University and St. Mary's University.

"We [UD and its sister schools] share the same philosophy of education," UD rector Rev. Paul Marshall said. "The integration of faith and reason is really important to us all and the instillation of faith and intellect is what we seek."

These three schools are the only Marianist universities in the U.S. St. Mary's is located in San Antonio, Texas and Chaminade is located in Honolulu, Hawaii. Although the three schools do share the Marianist aspect, they are all different from one another.

St. Mary's is a predominately Hispanic liberal arts school of approximately 2,000 undergraduates and 1,000 graduate students. While UD has a large population of students living on campus, most of St. Mary's students are commuters.

"There's a very large graduate population in business and law enforcement [at St. Mary's]," Marshall said.

Like St. Mary's, Chaminade is also a liberal arts school. Chaminade has approximately 1,000 undergraduate students of mostly Hispanic background and most of their students are Hawaiian. Aside from cultural differences, students who studied there noticed other differences in comparison with UD.

"The sense of community is lacking there," said junior Erin Moriarty who attended Chaminade University for the 2009 spring semester. "We lived a mile off campus and that was kind of weird not being able to go to your neighbor's houses [like you can here]. Food is also really expensive there because they have to bring everything over to the islands. One box of cereal was [about] seven dollars."

During her stay at Chaminade, which is located approximately just 10 minutes from Waikiki beach, Moriarty was able to travel to Maui for a weekend, and go on a dolphin-watching adventure and shark dive. However, these tropical experiences were not what was best about Moriarty's experience.

"I would definitely recommend it to other students; I had a great time and met some really great people," she said. "I would go back in a second if I had the chance."

Moriarty also noticed many academic differences. She is a fine arts major and she took 18 credits at Chaminade that all transferred to Dayton.

"I thought it [Chaminade] was easier than Dayton," Moriarty said. "As an arts major here I have to put in a lot of time out of class and at Chaminade I could pretty much finish all my work in class."

Each semester, 20 students are selected to study at either St. Mary's or Chaminade. The students pay UD tuition while they attend the sister school; they pay the housing costs of the sister school and all of their credits are permitted to transfer as long as they earn a C or higher.

"From campus you can see the ocean," Moriarty said. "It was awesome, it was so pretty."

For more information on UD's sister schools and the study opportunities they offer visit international.udayton.edu/edabroad/programs/chaminade.htm.