Prof. Jim Hedrick is
admiring a frame of honeycomb in front of a class of 20 students in Summer
Science Workshop. “This is technology coming from our understanding of the way
nature works,” he says.
It was a 19th-century
beekeeper, L.L. Langstroth, who discovered the “bee space,” explains Hedrick,
himself a beekeeper. The discovery meant that bees could be kept in human-built
hives, and that the honey could be harvested without damaging the colony.
Not the kind of lecture you
might expect from a professor who specializes in computer technology. But
Summer Science Workshop is not a curriculum which focuses on a narrow field.
Rather, it takes a wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary route to bring college-level
work to students who show promise in the sciences.
Hedrick, like the other
instructors in SSW, emphasizes the cross-disciplinary nature of learning. When
a visitor enters the classroom, Hedrick stops the lecture and asks him to
describe for the class the importance of developing clear writing skills for
the sciences.
The College's Summer Science
Workshop each year gives high schoolers valuable exposure to college-level study.
And Union gets something valuable too: eager students,
24 and counting.
SSW students will be giving poster presentations on the workshop's theme — HIV/AIDS — on Friday, July 18, from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. in the Olin Atrium.
Besides exposing nearly two dozen
budding scientists to the rigors of scientific research, the two-week
residential program has been something of a boon to the College's minority recruitment
effort.
Since its inception in 1996, 24 students
from the program have enrolled as students at Union.
Several have become counselors for the summer program. Last year, three of the
four counselors were former campers. This year, three of the five counselors
are former campers.
Summer Science Workshop, which
targets minorities who are underrepresented in the health professions and
biological sciences, provides exposure to college-level classroom and
laboratory study, and career guidance for fields in health professions and
scientific research.
“We used to soft sell the
students on Union,” says program coordinator Karen
Williams of the first few years of the workshop. “Now we take them down to
the admissions office for interviews and invite them to a reunion in the
fall.”
The program has HIV/AIDS as its
overarching theme. The students research the scientific, social and political
aspects of AIDS, and give presentations on a variety of topics related to the
epidemic. Beyond classes and labs in immunology, computer technology and
cellular biology, the students attend lectures at Albany
Medical College
and meet HIV-positive people and their families.
Williams and Hedrick are joined by
colleagues including Peter Tobiessen,
director; Twitty Styles, who teaches immunology; and Quynh Chu-LaGraff,
molecular biology.
Now funded entirely by the
College, the program was launched with support from the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute.