Penn Summer Science Academy:
[Via Cosmic Variance]
The last couple of weeks have seen our Department teeming with the participants in the Penn Summer Science Academy. This wonderful program, now in its twelfth year, is run by Bill Berner, who can also pull together any demonstration you may wish for in your classes. Guided by Bill, a number of other staff members and a local high school physics teacher, the students (“academically qualified high school students currently enrolled in 10th, 11th, or 12th grade”) go through an intensive physics experience for four weeks, including mini-courses, demos, research lectures, lab work and field trips, finishing up with a panel discussion on careers in science, featuring professionals from research, education, and industry.
On Tuesday I got to play a small part in this by delivering a lecture on modern cosmology
[More]
The summer between my sophomore and junior years in HIgh School, I took place in a program at the University of Texas at Austin, SSTP – Summer Science Training Program – funded by the NSF. Dr. Irwin Spear, who passed away a few years ago, ran it and provided lectures. we got to do research with real scientists and had to give a presentation based on our work.
This is where I decided I wanted to be a biologist. I got to hear about things I had not been exposed to (one of these was evolution, which we had not had time to get to in sophomore biology. Funny how the chapters on evolution were at the end of the book). We read actual papers by scientists, using Peters’ Classic Papers in Genetics.
It is where I learned what the day to day experience was like in a lab, where I saw how knowledge was gleaned from data and how sometimes a researcher had to make decisions about what data to use.
It was my first really extended time by myself. We stayed in Jester and got our first experience with dorm food service. I think one guy lived the entire time on McDonald’s french fries. I saw my first X-rated film (A Clockwork Orange. How tastes have changed!) and discovered college film series (I got to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers on a big screen. This would come in handy several years later at CalTech when I was able to raise my GPA by taking a film class and writing a paper on ‘Science Fiction Movies of the 50s: A Reflection of the Communist Menace’,where I compared the movies, and the stories they were made from, of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing From Another World.
Ahh. Memories. But is was a program like this that put me on the path that pretty much determined my life. I hope these current programs do the same and I am really encouraged by the researchers taking time to work with them
