Posted on Sep 1, 2003

Prof. Jim Hedrick is admiring a frame of synthetic honeycomb in front of a class of
students at the Summer
Science Workshop.

“This is technology coming from our understanding of the way nature works,” he says. It was nineteenth-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 narrow curriculum. 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 the workshop, emphasizes the cross-disciplinary nature of learning.

The College's Summer
Science Workshop gives high-schoolers valuable exposure to college-level study. And Union gets something valuable, too-nineteen eager students who researched the scientific, social, and political aspects of AIDS and gave presentations on a variety of topics related to the epidemic. Beyond classes and labs in immunology, computer technology, and cellular biology, students attended lectures at Albany Medical College and met HIV-positive people and their families.

This is the eighth year of the Summer Science Workshop, in which Hedrick is joined by colleagues Peter Tobiessen, Twitty Styles, and Quynh Chu-LaGraff, all of the Biology Department. Now funded entirely by the College, the program was launched with support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Besides exposing 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, twenty-four students from the program have enrolled as students at Union. Several have become counselors for the two-week summer program. Last year, three of four counselors were former campers; this year, it was three of five.

“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.”

To date, approximately 180 students have participated in the program. Of the seven who so far have graduated from the College, most went into medical, science, or math-related graduate programs, and two current Union students are in the eight-year Leadership in Medicine Program with Albany Medical College.

One of the teachers this year, Rizwan Jaffer, participated as a student in the first workshop in 1996, graduated from Union in 2001, and is now a student at the New England College of Optometry in Boston. Among other former SSW students are:

• Gretchen M. Pobee-Mensah '03, who has started the post baccalaureate pre-med program at Drexel University;
• Kendra P. Tinglin '03, who is in the graduate math program at Columbia, with a goal of teaching math at the university level;
• Kirk A. Campbell, who started NYU Medical School this fall;
• Abigail N. Belle '03, who
  is a global risk management solutions associate for PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Boston;

• Ayanna B. Cato '03, who has begun a graduate program in social work at Tulane;
• Claudio S. Flores '04, a counselor and emergency medical technician for the past two years;
• Emma E. Bendana '04, who is in the eight-year program with Albany Med;
• Keba K. Foster '04, a counselor this year;
• Roberto J. Millan '05, who is a political science major, pre-med, and counselor for the past three years; and
• Sabrina Hydery '05, who is in the eight-year program with Albany Med, and was a counselor last year.