PELLSTON, Mich. — Two-year-old Lando Stuyvesant easily adjusted to lake life in northern Michigan this summer with his parents.

The toddler made the University of Michigan Biological Station his playground the entire month of July as his mother took classes six days a week and his dad worked remotely along Douglas Lake for his job in digital marketing and advertising.

Lando, wearing a helmet, cheered for researchers, staff, students and families who ran in the 2025 Biological Station 5K on Sunday, July 20.

“Lando loved his time at the field research station,” said Sarah Hortig, a guest student from Grand Rapids Community College (GRCC). “He was extremely popular amongst the younger children there and became well known for his excited gibberish and affinity for stealing bikes. He is a social butterfly and loved meeting my classmates and faculty members and especially loved watching the annual 5K race with his friends and cheering on the UMBS community.”

Founded in 1909, UMBS is a research and teaching campus located on 10,000 forested acres surrounded by lakes and rivers where students and scientists from across the globe live and work as a community to learn from the place.

Hortig, 25, credits the resources and community support for parents at UMBS as the reason why she and her husband Taylor Stuyvesant were able to uproot their family from their Rockford, Michigan, home for four weeks so that she could follow her dreams of becoming a professional writer.

“I’ve been a stay-at-home parent now for nearly three years, and before that, I was working full-time, longing to return to school and earn my degree without the financial means to do so,” Hortig said. “My husband’s recent career change gave me the chance to return to school, and while it's been hard being a full-time parent and a full-time student, it's worth every late night. I hope that with a degree, I will be able to give my husband the same opportunity to go to school and follow his own path, as well as showing our son all the ways in which hard work pays off.”

Sarah Hortig, far left, walked through Cheboygan Marsh along Lake Huron on July 14 with her UMBS Environmental Writing class. The students met with Team Typha, a research group focused on combatting invasive plants that disrupt wetland ecosystems and crowd out native species.

Hortig, a sophomore based on accumulated credits, is finishing her pre-writing associate degree at GRCC, with the intent to transfer to a four-year institution to complete a bachelor’s degree in writing or English.

She took courses at UMBS through U-M’s Transfer Bridges to the Humanities (TB2H) program in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA) that helps community college students across Michigan throughout their transfer journey with advising, peer mentorship, connection with U-M co-curricular experiences and community building.

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the College of LSA launched TB2H with Henry Ford College in 2018. Since then, LSA’s transfer recruiters and their team of student ambassadors have worked with hundreds of community college students before, during, and after they cross their transfer bridges.

LSA Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Tim McKay said it’s more than just a recruiting program — TB2H enriches the lives of all the students involved.

“Through TB2H, community college students do research with U-M faculty, support arts organizations across the state through the Culture Corps program, take summer courses at UMBS, and more,” McKay said. “This work has grown every year, and in summer 2025, we were happy to support dozens of students from nine community colleges across the state.”

Lando watched researchers board a seaplane in July 2025 to rehome in the wild some of the piping plovers that were hatched and raised at the captive rearing center at UMBS as part of a decades-long conservation effort to save the endangered Great Lakes shorebirds.

In Hortig’s case, TB2H enriched the lives of her husband and son too.

“As an aspiring professional writer and returning college student, I was looking for opportunities to expand my learning beyond the classroom and strengthen my repertoire as a writer,” Hortig said. “After a recommendation from my transfer counselor as part of the TB2H program, I reached out to the UMBS team to see if accommodations could be made for my son and husband to join me while on campus. With a green light from them, I sent in my application and eagerly awaited July.”

At UMBS, Hortig took two three-credit English courses: “Environmental Writing: The Art of Observation” and “Learning from the Landscape.”

“A big part of both of my courses was integrating Native history and ethnobotany into our curriculum, and exploring texts related to such,” Hortig said. “We had a few very special opportunities to visit the Burt Lake Band Garden located just a few miles away from the Douglas Lake campus, to not only learn about the garden’s significance and the Burt Lake Band itself, but also to assist with some general weeding and planting. Another one of my favorite days was helping out at Ziibimijwang Farm, which serves the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians. We spent a few hours assisting with some weeding and learning about the farm itself and the meaningful ways in which it serves its community.”

“It was an absolute delight to have Sarah in my environmental writing course this summer,” said Dr. Lauren Gwin, a UMBS faculty instructor and a lecturer in the U-M English Department Writing Program. “Her thoughtful responses to her peers, astute observations about the natural world, and her perspective as a mom and returning student all made our classroom community stronger. As she wrote about and integrated knowledge drawn from our time together at the BioStation, Sarah displayed an exceptional ability to wrestle with the ethics of environmental education and historical memory.”

Leaving their cabin, Taylor and Lando walk down a road at UMBS leading to the Douglas Lake shoreline.

For housing, UMBS assigned the family to a larger cabin on a hilltop.

“It was positioned further away from the other student cabins, just two staircases up from the dining hall, so it was a quieter and more convenient location,” Hortig said. “Lando got his own room. We were also fortunate enough to have a private bathroom, which made bedtime all that much easier.”

UMBS has a Nature Day Camp for children ages 4-12 of faculty, researchers, staff and students at the remote campus in northern Michigan, but Lando was too young to participate this year.

However, childcare wasn’t an issue when Sarah and Taylor needed an occasional babysitter.

“We had a huge community of UMBS faculty and their own families that were more than eager to help us out,” Hortig said. “We had two great babysitters that were the children of two faculty members that would take Lando for a morning or afternoon adventure until either of us finished our day.”

The transition from home to a field research station — though daunting at first — proved nearly seamless.

Lando, far left, and two of his friends at UMBS. August, middle, is the child of a faculty member who teaches an English course at UMBS. Charlie, right, is the son of a UMBS staff member who leads marketing and communications.

“The opportunity to remove ourselves from our day-to-day routines and add some nature back into our lives helped us reset and refocus in a way that we didn’t imagine it would,” Hortig said. “It was a crazy proposition, at first, one we didn’t think would boil over very well for us. But while the first few days of navigating scheduling with my husband’s job and my own new 9-5 were tricky at first, we settled into the routine quickly and had a lot of fun doing it.”

In fact, the family found they had more time to be together at the Douglas Lake campus compared to life at home thanks, in part, to the dining hall.

“UMBS was unique, in that my 5-9 became a 9-5. But with that change came less to do — no dishes, no meal-prepping, no lawn to mow — so it actually left us with more time to spend as a family, even after my schoolwork was completed for each day,” Hortig said.

Now back to the normal routine at home in Rockford, Hortig is leaning into her time management skills to balance parenthood and college.

“Life is always busy with a toddler running around the house, but the quiet moments are precious when you have schoolwork that needs to get done,” Hortig said. “I have forced myself to become extremely organized when it comes to my schoolwork, utilizing planners, late nights, online classes, and babysitters to make it work. Every nap time is a chance to squeeze in a note-taking session. On nights when I have class, my partner who has a flexible schedule quits work early to give me time to study beforehand.”

Open to the possibility of returning to their paradise of place-based learning in Pellston next summer, Sarah, Taylor and Lando consider themselves lucky to have found an immersive community that proved welcoming, supportive, transformational and fun.

It’s something Hortig wants all prospective students — from U-M to community colleges — to keep in mind when considering whether to sign up for a summer adventure at UMBS.

“You will be richer for every moment you spend allowing yourself to experience new things,” Hortig said.

 

The University of Michigan Biological Station serves as a gathering place to learn from the natural world, advance research and education, and inspire action. We leverage over a century of research and transformative experiences to drive discoveries and solutions to benefit Michigan and beyond.

Our vast campus engages all of the senses. Its remote, natural setting nurtures deep thought and scientific discovery.

Founded in 1909, UMBS supports long-term research and education through immersive, field-based courses and features state-of-the-art equipment and facilities for data collection and analysis to help any field researcher be productive. It is where students and scientists from across the globe live and work as a community to learn from the place.

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