Director, Mountaineer Adventure Program, West Virginia University
by Jennifer Jett
THE FACT THAT Greg Corio is the director of the Mountaineer Adventure Program (MAP) at West Virginia University should come as no surprise. Since childhood, Greg has embraced the natural world, nurturing a passion for outdoor adventure that he is now able to use in reaching out to first-year college students who are at risk of dropping out before graduation.
Greg’s aptitude for supporting and guiding others took root the summer he worked as a lifeguard and matured when he accepted his first job managing the climbing program for Kitty Hawk Kites in Outer Banks, NC. In college, he volunteered with Natural High, an after-school program at South Charleston High School, where he found a mentor in Glenn Toler, the program director, whose passion for making a difference in students’ lives inspired him. “I was amazed at the impact and change you could have on students by engaging them in the outdoors,” Greg says. It was on a program trip to Mexico that Greg realized this was his calling.
In 1999, Greg caught the entrepreneurial spirit when he developed an artificial climbing wall that he sold to Entre Prises, one of the world’s largest climbing wall manufacturers. In 2003, that spirit captured him again when he began work on a graduate project for his Master’s degree in recreation, parks and tourism resources at WVU. The result was Adventure WV, an outdoor orientation program for incoming WVU freshmen.
Today, Adventure WV is just one of several programs under the MAP umbrella, and a sign of its significant growth since its start as a student project is the number 2,933—the number of WVU students the program served in 2010 alone. Under Greg’s leadership, MAP has developed several international experiential education programs around the world, including Patagonia, Fiji, Peru and New Zealand. MAP has also developed new orientation programs that target specific student populations, including Adventure Journalism School, Adventure Business & Economics, Adventure Vets and Fresh Start. As a result, students who participate in the program have a 7.3 percent higher retention rate, higher GPAs and higher graduation rates. Greg’s vision for the WVU Challenge Course, a high adventure ropes course used for orientation programs, has also come to fruition, adding to the arsenal of tools to fight higher education drop-out rates.
An aspect of life that Greg embraces is service, which is also one of the core pillars of MAP. Students participate in community service projects in Northern West Virginia, and at the end of 2010, Adventure WV students, under Greg’s direction, had contributed to almost 24,000 hours of service that included planting trees and participating in river cleanups. “My goal through these programs is to make a positive difference in the lives of WVU students and help them grow into citizens that are connected to and contribute to West Virginia.”
In addition to his role as director of MAP, Greg is also responsible for the campus-wide initiative to build partnerships with the new Summit Bechtel National Scout Reserve. He sits on the Summit Bechtel Reserve Medical Planning Team as a volunteer.
It’s easy for Greg to apply the principles of the great outdoors to a career. “There is a direct connection between taking calculated risk in the outdoors and with your career,” he explains. “If you do your research, realize the threats and set realistic goals, you can accomplish anything. You have to love what you do. It’s easy to get up in the morning to go to work if you believe what you are doing is making a difference in someone else’s life.”
Photography by Tracy Toler on location at Stonewall Resort
