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Everyone wants to travel the globe. David “Tavi” Merrill has actually applied for the job. The 25-year-old University of Maine student has his fingers crossed that he’ll become one of two STA [Student Travel Australia] World Traveler interns this summer.
“There’s one thing I haven’t done, but I’m dying to do,” Tavi says in his video application on YouTube. The camera pans from a computer screen to his face as he finishes the sentence with a boyish smile: “See the world.”
STA, the world’s largest student travel organization, according to their Web site, will hire two interns to document their daily travels with video, blogs, podcasts and music. Spanning the summer of 2009, the itinerary, available on worldtravelerintern.com, will take the interns across Europe, Asia, Eastern Africa and Australia.
Other applicants’ far-reaching travels intimidated Tavi at first. The sustainable agriculture junior has only ventured as far outside the U.S. as Quebec, Canada.
“I’ve had some great adventures without ever traveling far,” he says in his video. He lists experiences like spending a summer on an island doing seabird conservation, managing a student-run sustainable agriculture community farm called the Black Bear Food Guild, and whetting his appetite for global citizenry by being a resident assistant in Estabrooke Hall, largely occupied by international students.
The first stage of the application requires a video less than three minutes long and a written portion. A YouTube search for “STA World Traveler Intern 2009″ on Jan. 28 found 43 results.
The “Help Tavi become a 2009 World Travel Intern!” Facebook group has 215 members. His video has more than 900 views.
Tavi aimed for the video to show “not just who I am, but ‘this is my place, this is my culture,’ and trying to weave the two together,” he said in an interview. The clip integrates Tavi’s qualifications and lifestyle into a travel narrative format, with the bulk filmed on a visit to Presque Isle, detailing his first snowmobiling trip.
Tavi and his friend Ryan Lockhart, a UMaine graduate who also appears in the video, performed the video’s soundtrack together on guitar and violin.
“He’s got a real enthusiasm for trying to tell stories,” said Eric Gallandt, associate professor of weed ecology and management at UMaine. Gallandt first met Tavi in a course in the fall of 2007.
Gallandt called Tavi “a gregarious sort” and said he embodies “the local, rural Maine kid with an opportunity to go do some fantastic things.”
“He really puts everything he’s got into any topic he chooses to work on,” Gallandt said.
Gallandt’s favorite Tavi tale is when he dismissed a computer simulation for weed growth after Gallandt assigned it to his class.
“It was very funny how he immediately took this simple model and immediately just threw it away as such a gross oversimplification of the world,” Gallandt said. Tavi came back within a week with his own system – “the most complicated and involved set of boxes and arrows and loops” – and Gallandt could tell Tavi had spent night after night working on his model.
“He’s probably one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met,” said Lianne Lackey, a graduate student for higher education and one of Tavi’s former residents in Estabrooke Hall. “At first when I heard of Tavi I was like, ‘Who is this Tavi character?’”
Tavi, whose given name is David, grew up in Massachusetts with “a group of Davids,” he said. His family moved to Newburgh, Maine in 2000. A fiddler, he jammed with five Davids soon after moving. Yearning for something less popular, he discovered the name Tavi online, a Finnish variation of David, and adopted a title as unique as his character.
“He’s just open to anything and doesn’t worry about what other people think,” Lackey said, reciting a tale of the two wrestling in Estabrooke, where Lackey “kicked his butt.” Directly after, Tavi had no difficulty taking down a much larger opponent.
Student Stephanie Sosinski worked with Tavi on the Black Bear Food Guild and thought Tavi’s video was characteristic of him. She is confident in his chances at earning the position.
“Something I don’t find too often of people in general is the passion for whatever they’re doing,” Sosinski said.
For Tavi, the opportunity to communicate his adventure with photos and stories is one of the most exciting possibilities of the STA internship.
“The really important thing to me is that traveling is – it’s a way to learn both about yourself and about the world around you – taking the time to have the experiences that allow insight of any kind, whether it’s talking to a random stranger, whether it’s seeing something that lets you access a space of awe,” he said.
When asked what his biggest traveling dreams are, Tavi had a tough time whittling them down. Turkey, Israel and Patagonia are high on his list. Tavi is victim to seeing a gorgeous photo and being unable to rid the destination from his mind’s eye.
“There are pictures of places I’ve seen and they’ve really.” he drifts off for a moment before speaking of black limestone mountains rising starkly over fields of canola in Southeast Asia, ruminating as if he’s seen them in person.
Tavi has a reason for not exploring as much as he’d like. “I’ve got this really strong responsible streak; I almost bought a house last spring,” he said. He worries about cracking into his nest egg before leaving college. Tavi was unable to study abroad due to a demanding academic program, commitment juggling and a lack of time to investigate the available programs.
Tavi ventured west of the Appalachians for the first time on a recent five-day visit to California for an ecological farming conference. He enjoys allowing a journey to guide him, rather than controlling his explorations meticulously, and put this philosophy to the test on a “dry run” during his trip out west.
He also used his trip to delve into travel blogging, a crucial component of the STA position. Tavi’s blog – ramblingwejak.blogspot.com – allows readers to walk in his footsteps, facilitated by astute photography and animated writing.
The deadline for World Traveler applications is March 8. Twenty finalists will be selected on March 15. The top 10 will be asked to create a second video. Tavi shot footage during his California journey in hopes of using it to create his follow-up piece.
“You want a guy with the eyes of a pro photographer, a poet’s fondness for words, an unhealthy addiction for fresh air, who sees the world with new eyes every morning? I’m your man,” Tavi says in the video, deftly checking off each of the position’s qualifications.
“He’s so real and he doesn’t put up a front. You can’t help but like him,” Lackey said. Soon Tavi will know if STA feels the same way.
Bangor Daily News