The Mystic Seaport is a popular destination for locals and tourists alike, but just across the street is a “best kept secret in study away programs” that even a lifelong resident of southeastern Connecticut might not know about.

Instead of the standard study abroad program, Williams-Mystic is a semester maritime studies program through Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. and based in Mystic. Students take courses in the history, literature, science and policy of the sea and participate in a variety of field seminars that send them coast to coast. They also conduct original research and take courses in maritime skills taught at Mystic Seaport. And they’ve been doing it since 1977.

Executive director Tom Van Winkle said the program was started by Williams College history professor Ben Labaree, who came up with the idea for a semester program in maritime studies after bring students to the Seaport for the school’s January session. According to lore, the program was drafted by Labaree and his students on the back of a Dunkin Donuts napkin. Since then, about 1,600 people have gone through the Williams-Mystic program.

“You wander the Seaport grounds, and you’ll find Williams-Mystic alumni who have committed their lives to doing something having to do with the ocean because of the Williams-Mystic program,” Van Winkle said.

The program is open to students of any major, and several colleges send students to the “coastal studies campus of Williams” for the semester, where they live in restored historic homes across the street from the Seaport. Each class of about 20 students goes on three immersive field seminars to sites on the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts for lectures, site visits and research. Van Winkle said the variety of student disciplines and experiences allows each group to come together and approach problems from different perspectives for a true liberal arts experience.

“The world presents its problems to us in ways that cannot be solved by looking at it through one discipline,” he said. “What we do is have students look at problems through multiple lenses … and it teaches them that in order to solve problems, you really have to look at it holistically.”

Tucked away up the hill is the Carlton Marine Science Center, which is home to the program’s classroom and laboratory spaces. Katie Swoap, a junior at Williams studying biology and neuroscience, is studying the productivity of mussels she collected at Narragansett, and she said she has loved the program.

“I knew I liked science beforehand, but it’s just been really awesome,” she said, adding that she hopes to pursue a PhD in marine biology. “It’s really neat having all of our classes down by the Seaport, and it’s all been super interdisciplinary and hands-on.”

Research projects like Swoap’s are often repeated after several years as a way to study changing conditions in the area over time. Van Winkle said the work done at Williams-Mystic could be a good resource for local municipal commissions because the students and staff have a lot of valuable information about the Mystic River, Long Island Sound and other bodies of water.

Beyond that, however, community outreach has been limited thus far to the “weird bucket of something” that someone might bring to former director and invasive species specialist Jim Carlton for identification. Mauro Diaz-Hernandez, director of admissions and enrollment, said the program is working to build a larger presence in the community by setting up displays with a touch tank at events at the Seaport to introduce residents to the program.

a.hutchinson@theday.com

Twitter: @ahutch411