I don’t know how it works at other schools, but professors were actively involved in making opportunities available. My Australian internship (or at least, us hearing about it) was due to a partnership between a professor in the Ag. Dept. (I started as an Ag. major) and a colleague at the USDA, which has a sister lab in Brisbane. The language department helped me hook up with the organization that found my german internship, and of course the study abroad.
Definitely. Just the connections you make are amazing. I didn’t end up going down that route, but I had offers.
More on the student labor - In the time I was there, I worked in the gardens and greenhouses (which had a CSA and were transitioning to organic), the farm (raised cattle, hogs, lambs, goats later, and much of the fodder for those animals - and I mean working: I did midnight checks during lambing season, tilled and planted fields on the weekends, fed and watered cattle on cold wintery days, castrated piglets (worst morning ever, btw, no lunch for me!), the photo lab, construction of the ecovillage (from foundation work to framing), and eventually settled in as a sustainability outreach coordinator leading natural building workshops, running student programs, etc. But one of my best friends got a job cleaning the library at night and stuck with that the whole time. He said, “I just want to find the easiest thing to do and not work hard.” So you definitely get out what you put into it.
But art major friends worked in the art department and got to set up exhibitions and record artworks for the archives, so they graduated with really valuable skills on top of their fine art skills, arguably making them more employable than art students from other schools.
So, this is slowly changing, but Berea is a dry town in a “■■■■■” county*. I did not know this when I arrived, but it was the best thing. You had to drive 15 miles north to the nearest town that sold beer, and car ownership on campus was restricted, so you had to really want to drink/party. I mean, there were still little house parties, but nothing like the bar scene up the road in Lexington. You could feel it in the whole town. Walking around at night alone was never a cause for concern, maybe b/c there weren’t any rowdy drunks out and about.
And the school would host a series of cultural convocations, usually on Thursday evenings. Students had to attend at least 8, but I went to almost all of them. I saw traditional Japanese shadow puppet theater, saw Ravi Shankar perform, heard Malcolm X’s daughter, Attalah Shabazz speak, the list goes on and on. All free to students, several open to the public.
I bet! I wish you would have stumbled upon it at the right time. Maybe we would’ve been classmates.
I didn’t go straight from HS to college, but spent 5 years hitchhiking around, sleeping in the woods or behind dumpsters, or later when I made it big, in a van, and working various service industry jobs before I realized I was ready for college. It was blind luck that I learned about it, and got in. In my opinion, it’s a great opportunity for anyone who finds it, but I think my prior experience definitely contributed to me getting so much out of it.
The sense of community in that place was amazing. It’s jaded me. I now live in an area with a small liberal arts college which charges something like $45,000 annual tuition and makes it relatively clear that “townspeople” aren’t really meant to enjoy any of the facilities or interact with the college community 
*I don’t know why it’s blocking that word, but it’s the synonym of partially wet; damp. It means some towns in a county could sell booze, but some could not.
