Young world traveler’s book meant to start conversation about area, cruise industry
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY – Just shy of a decade out of high school, Miles Schoedler has already traveled to 40 countries across five continents as a brand ambassador for Microsoft and the Holland America Line.
Now, during a roughly year-long break from the cruise line industry that has been in hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he is using his experiences to create Boardwalk Republic. It is a long-term project that envisions local residents experiencing cultures around the world, becoming cultural ambassadors, like he has, while simultaneously luring world travelers here to experience the culture and communities of southern New Jersey.
Schoedler wants to get people thinking about making this area a seaport destination, linking the resurgence of Atlantic City to that of the cruise line industry. For now, it is an intellectual exercise to stimulate that conversation. He has written a book, also entitled “Boardwalk Republic,” as the first step in his project.
The book is written as “an exploratory fiction narrative” with characters who start out in Atlantic City and traverse the world aboard a cruise ship.
“It stimulates your imagination,” he said. “I imagine you reading this on the beach this summer. You’re sitting back in a lounge chair and looking at the water and you’re imagining this experience where a ship can come out of the water and pick you up and take you anywhere. Who would you meet on this ship? How would you interact? It takes on key episodes from my experience that were really enlightening ….”
“A lot of it is written like a philosophical open-ended type of exercise where you go through and read the dialogue and see the imagery and start to imagine what this experience would look like,” he explained. The reader would ask, “What would I choose to do?”
One of the key aspects or thought experiments in the book is that “the protagonist has a compass and he approaches a portal, which is like a wheel on the ship, and you can pick an excursion of your choice. Half of it is random and half of it is designed.”
The backstory on Miles Schoedler
Before exploring the world, let’s back up to explore how Schoedler got to this point.
He graduated in 2011 from Ocean City High School, where he was among the best distance runners in school history. He went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he continued his running career while pursuing a degree in international relations. (He interned in Congress for about a year with former U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo.) After graduating from Georgetown in 2015, he worked in business development and business intelligence consulting for Oracle and for a market research company.
He always wanted to travel, but training and competing as a Division I athlete while a student limited that. His interests also were piqued by his fellow students; Georgetown recruits and admits a large percentage of international students and he made friends from far-flung places including Colombia, Europe and Asia.
In 2017, after his professional career kept him busy between Boston and California, he accompanied his father, Craig Schoedler, a professional bass player – Miles is named after music legend Miles Davis – on a cruise while his father played in the show bands. He stumbled upon a host hired to do seminars on Microsoft Studio for passengers on the Holland America cruises. He talked to the host, who was hired to teach digital storytelling using the latest Surface products, “and I was hooked.” The cruise changed his entire perspective.
He submitted an application, talked to a recruiter “and I was on a ship two weeks later in the Caribbean,” he laughed.
“It was a big life decision because I had no idea the potential for a career at sea,” he said. “Not a lot of people who take cruises think about working full-time aboard. Most of the crew members are from Southeast Asia and I have had a chance to learn so much about the culture in Indonesia and Bali. I never thought about this.”
“For about the past four years now, I’ve been to five continents, 40 countries, representing Microsoft and the Holland America Line on board, different itineraries, different seasons. I’ve been in Alaska the past four summers, I’ve been in the Caribbean a lot. I was set to go to the Baltic Sea a year ago and then the COVID pandemic happened.”
And then the pandemic happened
Schoedler was stranded for about two months at anchor off the coast of Grand Bahama with crew members from multinational countries. “I was one of four Americans and we couldn’t get back into the country,” he said. He finally got on the phone with some former colleagues from Congress and with the U.S. Coast Guard, and was able to have LoBiondo inquire with the State Department about what as going on “with the humanitarian crisis with all these crew members stuck in a global pandemic.”
Finally, he was able to get off the ship and take a direct flight from Fort Lauderdale to Atlantic City. He thought he would be out for about two more weeks and then resume his contract aboard ship, but the industry has been anchored, so to speak, during the pandemic. He was up for a promotion to cruise director, but that was put on hold by the pandemic. He started working on a master’s degree in the United Kingdom, but a lockdown there sent him back to the states around Christmas. While working on his book and project, and awaiting the time when the cruise lines start traveling again, he also has been working as a long-term pandemic substitute at Ocean City Intermediate School.
A brand ambassador, a different cruise
As a “brand ambassador,” Schoedler promotes Microsoft products and Holland America. He runs seminars on digital storytelling for the passengers about the destinations they are visiting. Unlike other cruise lines, in which passengers go to destinations as tourists, Holland America has excursions that are meant to immerse its passengers in the culture of the place they are visiting. Rather than going out to buy souvenirs, the passengers are there for the experience and Schoedler helps them find ways to memorialize that.
Those excursions are “destination first, enrichment focused, getting one-on-one interactions with the real people who live there. It’s a very inspiring voyage to see a part of the world,” he explained. “I would go to South America for two months and see the entire circumnavigation of the coastline, Antarctica for four days to bring on researchers to talk about the ecology and the culture and that is unique. Our cruise line essentially gets out of the way. It’s a floating hotel for you to stay and experience a destination and talk about it with your fellow passengers. In my opinion, it’s one of the best jobs in the world. I love it. It’s incredible.”
Work inspired project
Schoedler wants other local people to experience what he has. That is what inspired his Boardwalk Republic project to encourage travel around the world and diversifying the economy by creating a seaport that brings world travelers here.
“The biggest tragedy that I see is that people wait until later on in their life to do something like this,” he said about thosewaiting until retirement to travel. “Being under 30, I started when I was just out of college, 23 or 24, and I’ve seen most of the world …. I’m easily able to connect with people from different countries. That’s directly in line with what Georgetown taught me, which is that you’re an ambassador of your culture and your country in kind of this type of global citizenship outlook on the world. I’m very grateful that I’ve had this opportunity and I want other people to consider it.”
Back to the book and scholarship
The book is written in three acts, first following the protagonist and origin story of Max, the protagonist, and his journey about M.S. World One, followed by supporting characters and their struggles to reconcile their biases, and finally a showdown with the antagonist, Price, who strives to “colonize every historic port in the Mediterranean.”
(Learn more about the book online at indiegogo.com/projects/boardwalk-republic-by-miles-shades#/).
It is being published by New Degree Press, which describes itself as an “innovative publishing and media company that aims to help creators demonstrate and inspire others through their work.”
New Degree Press green-lit the manuscript so he is going into the revision stage now, working with editors, copy editors and story developers to make the narrative fit the message of the bigger project.
“The book is just one slice of the Boardwalk Republic project that I’m launching this spring,” he said.
On the website, Schoedler explains the book is meant to start the larger conversation about the bigger project in and around Atlantic City, an idea that began while he was in college. He met and was inspired by Nelson Johnson, author of “Boardwalk Empire,” that was made into a hit HBO series about a period in the history of Atlantic City.
Schoedler’s senior thesis at Georgetown, however, was about the future of Atlantic City.
“I thought of Atlantic City and the potential,” Schoedler said. “Someone my age, under 30, we don’t have a lot of opportunity here. We have to go somewhere else. I think it is a waste because it’s a beautiful place to live – if there was more diversity in employment and opportunities.”
That is why he is envisioning the idea about making a cruise line seaport in Atlantic City, encouraging a cultural exchange while expanding the economy.
“I want to get people talking about this as a serious project and what it would mean for this region,” he said.
The website has links for presale of the book and additional ways to donate because once the expenses of publishing are covered, proceeds are going to benefit Oceans 250, an ocean conservation project, and Scholarship America, to pay for young people to have the same experience he has had traveling the world.
Schoedler believes in the power of cultural diplomacy.
“It’s the exchange of values across continents, countries and cultures without public diplomacy, which is the State Department,” he said. While welcoming visitors from other areas, southern New Jersey would be sending out its own “cultural ambassadors” in the form of entertainers aboard ships so people from around the world would learn more about this area.
Miles is the son of Craig and Helen Schoedler, who live in Upper Township, and the grandson of James and Nancy Schoedler, who have a house in Ocean City. Miles spent his summers on the island and went to Upper Township schools before OCHS.
To contact Schoedler about the project, email him at mes267@georgetown.edu or connect with him on Linked In at LinkedIn.com/in/miles369.