Summer Academy is an immersive, academically challenging 4-week online program designed for high school students who have completed 10th, 11th, or 12th grade and are interested in exploring a relevant academic interest.
Our program offers high school students the incredible opportunity to learn from renowned professors, study alongside like-minded students, showcase your potential to college admissions officers and earn 3 transferable college credits.
Students who participate in Summer Academy stay intellectually engaged over the summer and are exposed to new ideas and perspectives. Explore topical content areas from the following classes:
Young people entering higher education face a uniquely challenging set of social, economic, and environmental crises, and are eager to find ways to make a difference. At UVM, and in Vermont more broadly, reimagining the food system has become an avenue for meaningful and generative ways to tackle these issues. With an emphasis on community engagement in an academic context, this course introduces students to agroecology – an interdisciplinary approach to agriculture and food systems that works to build healthy, sustainable, and just human and environmental ecosystems. After participating in this course, students will not only have a strong grounding in agroecology and food systems, but also will be uniquely positioned to navigate the UVM landscape, to engage with community partners and organizations, to connect with Vermont as a source of learning, and to explore their role in meaningful social and environmental change.
This course has been designed to introduce students to the field of Medical Laboratory Science. The course combines lecture and laboratory practice, to allow students to demonstrate professionalism and interpersonal skills while achieving competence with common laboratory procedures virtually. As an online course, students will be assigned with lectures and laboratory assignments towards the beginning of the course and will be assigned case studies, that are related to the acquired knowledge, during the latter half of the course. Cases will include case history presented, clinical signs and symptoms, initial and additional laboratory testing and data, relevant test methodologies employed and accurate interpretation of results.
As we move deeper into the 21st century, one thing seems certain: the state of the world is uncertain. Whether it be climate change, biodiversity loss, forest fires, and/or social instability, it is clear societies face numerous challenges that raise questions about what the future holds. In this course we examine the roots of these challenges, focusing on the climate crisis and its broad social and ecological ripple effects. In particular, we ask questions about how these crises came to be, how they are connected, how they impact mental health, and how we might respond to them in just, equitable, and courageous ways. This course offers an introduction to key concepts in the discipline of geography. Course materials reflect a diverse range of concerns related to the social and ecological dimensions of climate change.
Students will learn and apply techniques in biology, genetics, chemistry, and physics while studying how they relate to the forensic investigation of crimes. A wide range of topics will be covered including DNA, entomology, fingerprinting, trace evidence, serology, blood spatter, and chemical analysis of compounds. Students will use case studies, hands on activities and a true crime project to illustrate their learning.
The aim of this online course is to introduce fundamental concepts in Neuroscience. The course will be broken into four modules; 1. Electrical properties of the neuron, 2. Synapses and networks, 3. Sensory systems, and 4. Beyond the cell. In addition, throughout the course there will be a student-led discovery of expression, structure and function of a gene of interest and how it relates to human disease. Lectures will be asynchronous to allow students to work on their own time, and there will be four each week (except the first week with the holiday). I will be checking in to blackboard several times a day during the course and will hold office hours on Microsoft Teams. You can expect a response from me usually within a few hours or first thing in the morning if you post later at night.
This summer course exposes students to the interdisciplinarity of modern science through hands-on learning in labs, interactive lectures, engaged discussions with researchers and medical professionals, and a group project. COMU 1990 provides a comprehensive overview of the different approaches and strategies needed to understand human health from basic research to patient care and treatment. Students will explore, and refine, their interests in STEM, while developing an understanding of potential career paths to determine if a career in health or medicine is right for them. The selected focus for Summer 2024 will be metabolic diseases.
In this course students will experiment with forms in which “the documentary” and “the creative” intersect. We’ll explore writing which informs on issues—social, cultural, and political—but utilizes a creative lens and techniques we may associate more commonly with fiction and poetry. We’ll experiment with literary journalism, the lyric essay, hybrid texts, and documentary poetry. We will examine the work of contemporary poets and writers in order to further understand our own work and the creative process. These writers will include Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, Elizabeth Alexander, Diane Di Prima, and CD Wright. The class is organized around student writing, and we will workshop on a daily basis. Welcome to a community of writers. A dedication to craft, aesthetic innovation, and risk-taking is expected in this course. Vigorous and thoughtful class participation is required.
You can check out additional course information at our website!
