Alums give back to river class that sent them on new and fulfilling paths

By Chelyen Davis

In the summer of her senior year at Virginia Commonwealth University, Maya Walters took a class that would change her life.

The class was Footprints on the James, a multiweek immersive course through the College of Humanities and Sciences, with the RecWell Outdoor Adventure Program. Students explored the James River watershed, traveling by raft, kayak and bateau; camping overnight; hiking; and learning about the human and natural histories of the river and how they intersect.

Walters, a history major, was graduating that December. She had planned to go on to grad school, but her weeks on the river taught her she wanted to get out of a classroom, so she looked for work experience instead.

"After that trip I decided that I want to work outside, having the experience of being in the field and the experiential learning of it," Walters said. "I realized I do far better when I'm actively working. … Taking that course really changed the complete trajectory of my life and my career."

Footprints on the James has been offered every other year since that 2014 trip and by now has more than 70 alums. In 2026, for the first time, the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability, the home of the course today, held a reunion for alums - and invited them to give future students the same opportunity for a life-changing experience by supporting the new Immersive River & Field STEM Education Fund. The fund will support Footprints and other immersive field studies courses that take students into nature to experience the environments they're studying, as well as students pursuing a River Studies and Leadership Certificate.

A photo of the first group of VCU students and their professors who took the Footprints on the James class in 2014. (James Vonesh)

Operating an intense, expeditionary course like Footprints comes with additional costs such as food and transportation. Footprints asks students to pay $200 each, with the rest covered by a patchwork of grants and school funding, said James Vonesh, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability who founded the Footprints course with Daniel Carr, assistant professor, and Joey Parent, senior assistant director for outdoor leadership, and still leads it. But Vonesh would love it if the program could sustain itself with donations that demonstrate how valuable it is to students.

"Not only does that make us more sustainable, it's also evidence to the university that this is important," Vonesh said. "If somebody puts in $10 and donates to this, that's telling VCU, 'I think this class was important to me.'"

The fund was launched at the Footprints reunion, and Walters was among the first group of donors.

"It was an honor to be able to support a class that so greatly changed my trajectory," she said.

Walters went on to work in school settings, then outdoor adventure programs and finally a nature-focused daycare.

"My career has turned into getting kids outside," she said. "Just having the experience of having that class, realizing how fortunate I was … it's not something that's accessible to so much of our population. We need to build climate-resilient communities. We can't do that if you don't have climate scientists. You can't do that if you don't have kids who get out in nature."

Ryan Levering also took the inaugural Footprints class in 2014. And, like Walters, it changed his life.

He had transferred to VCU from community college on a premed track but had switched to environmental science and was trying to catch up.

"When the course was advertised, it really spoke to me because growing up, I was always outside, I really liked to go camping, be on the water. … It seemed like a cool opportunity to merge the things I really liked to do," he said.

The class helped him build close relationships with professors and other adults and gave him confidence he hadn't had before.

"(The) very small group coupled with the staff that were with us for the entire trip … and the networks and connections you establish along the way - those set me up to get me to where I'm at now," Levering said. "It's been a long and winding path. It built up my confidence to really interact closely with staff members and my professors at VCU, and it piqued an interest in birds, actually."

The class spent one evening calling owls at James River State Park, Levering said, inspiring him to reach out to VCU environmental studies professor Lesley Bulluck to seek an undergraduate research project about owls.

After helping him get involved in an owl-monitoring project at the VCU Rice Rivers Center, Levering said, Bulluck also connected him with Henrico County staff about a mosquito monitoring project. He has now worked for Henrico County for the past decade, in the transportation department.

"The big thing that sticks with me is it felt like a launching point for me," Levering said. "It's a month-long course. It's hard to believe that one month in a summer semester can change so much for somebody … but looking back, I could always point to that summer, that trip, that class, and say this is where I really started to lay a groundwork to get where I'm at now. Just very thankful for that opportunity."

He too attended the reunion this summer and donated to the fund.

"Even though (paying the Footprints cost) was only a couple of hundred more than your normal fees, it did feel like something that may be prohibitive," Levering said. "I just felt like I wanted to be able to help out a little bit. … It just made such a difference for me. If it was anything that can help remove that barrier at all, I thought that was a good idea."

Footprints on the James and other immersive field studies courses have proved transformative for VCU students over the years. (James Vonesh)

To Vonesh, the stories of Levering and Walters are not surprising. The course is designed to build a sense of teamwork and belonging among students as part of the learning outcomes - a bonding and community-building that's common in expeditions. Otherwise, he said, "we could teach this in the classroom."

But the course does bring classroom learning to the expedition. Vonesh and other professors make the time during the expeditions for students to collect and process data, organize and analyze it, and create presentations.

"One of the things that makes this class unique," Vonesh said, "is we have really embedded the course research deeply into the course."

Vonesh has led similar courses on other rivers, and has led this kind of course at other universities, nationally and internationally. He helps train faculty at other universities who are creating new field courses like Footprints, and has a good sense of what's going on in the field. Vonesh said VCU's collaboration between the outdoor program and the science programs is rare at U.S. colleges.

"There are science programs that do this kind of thing, and there are outdoor programs that do something like this, but the deep collaboration between them is kind of unique," he said. "We just did it organically, (but) this collaboration accident is actually something really, really special and has allowed us to create programming that is globally and nationally distinctive, if not unique. We've learned that collaboration is really important."