people who visit the university's Elvehjem Museum of Art each year

students around the world who each year grow Wisconsin Fast Plants developed by UW-Madison biologists

stations that broadcast Earthwatch Radio, co-produced by the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Sea Grant Institute

More than 1,000 miles from the classrooms of UW-Madison, in the village of Heart Butte, Montana, Jennifer Cinelli had a Wisconsin idea.

Cinelli spent one week of her 2002 summer vacation on a Blackfeet reservation in northern Montana, participating in UW-Madison's first Service and Learning Adventure (SALA), a travel program that mingles students, staff, and alumni in community-service settings. The group was there to work, to lend a hand while learning about Blackfeet life and society.

On this day, the UW team was supposed to erect a swing set on the grounds of the local Head Start facility, but the going was rocky — literally. Montana's rock-filled soil made digging holes tough. The group kept unearthing piece after piece of hardened earth — which eventually led Cinelli to inspiration. She and fellow student Caty Patton found some paint and turned all that rock into an art project, helping children decorate the stones and array them around the playground.

"It was so much fun," Cinelli says. "We made a huge mess. But at the end of it all, we had 10 smiling kids."

The SALA program reminded Cinelli that university work can take many forms — from digging holes, to painting rocks, to sharing life experiences with people of different backgrounds and perspectives. "It really was a milestone in my education," she says. "I've sat in classrooms for five semesters now, learning the material and taking things in. But I think there's a very necessary element to education, and that is to do outreach — to have direct contact with people from other communities."

The experience she describes is actually one of the university's long-standing traditions as well as a strategic priority — the Wisconsin Idea, which is a commitment to share the resources of the university with the state, the nation, and beyond.

Cinelli says UW-Madison resonates with "a vibe that just screams, 'Get involved.'" A junior majoring in social work, she has done her part, volunteering with several community organizations and helping lead a campus effort to raise awareness about sexual assault. Like so many of her peers at UW-Madison, she regards education not as something to be digested and regurgitated on tests, but as an interactive process of seeing and doing. The Service and Learning Adventure, which plans to offer trips again in 2003 to new sites around the country, is one way that process comes to life.

"It put a great perspective on my education," says Cinelli. "Now, when I'm in my classes, I feel like I have such a rich context for what I'm learning. I'm able to connect what I learn in class to what I experienced in Montana — and that's education to me."