Stanford EPGY
The Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) Summer Institutes is a residential program for academically talented and motivated middle-school and high-school students, providing them with the opportunity to study advanced topics in subject areas not normally taught in their schools. In addition to enriching and accelerating their academic pursuits through engaging and challenging courses, these students are immersed in a social environment with others from across the country and around the world who share their academic interests and abilities. Students leave the program with a sense of academic accomplishment, new friends, and fond memories of a wonderful time spent at Stanford University.
As part of its outreach component, AHPCRC provided scholarships to 30 EPGY Summer Institutes participants in physics, computer science, biotechnology, engineering, and mathematics. These students came from 10 states and were close to evenly split between male and female. Just over one third of the students were in the Middle School Program, the rest were in the Summer Institutes for high school students. The scholarships were awarded based on academic ability and promise, targeting those with economic need and from historically under-represented groups.
Summer Institutes students participate in intensive study in a single course and they live in small residences with students who are all taking courses in the same subject area. Students are taught by Stanford instructors who design courses specifically for the EPGY Summer Institutes population. Subject areas include mathematics, science, writing, humanities, computer science, engineering and business. The instructors are assisted by undergraduate and graduate student mentors who have expertise in the course subject areas. These mentors serve a dual role of Residential Counselor and Teaching Assistant so that the academic and social aspects of the program are tightly integrated. In addition the academic program students participate in a wide range of recreational activities.
In their courses, the AHPCRC-supported students studied such topics as particle physics, cosmology, quantum mechanics, robotics, java programming, aeronautics, microbiology, biomechanical engineering, material science, non-Euclidean geometry, and number theory. Many of these courses included lab projects and visits to laboratory facilities at Stanford or in the local area. In one section of the Biotechnology course, students worked in small teams to develop an electro-mechanical catheter that is capable of navigating through, and sensing various signals in, a simulated heart environment. In the Quantum Mechanics course, learned how to solve the Schrodinger equation for simple one and two-dimensional, and later on in the course they received an advanced introduction to quantum computing. In the Aeronautics section of the Engineering course, students visited the Hiller Aviation Museum and the NASA-Ames Research Center, and as one of their projects, students built radio-controlled gliders. In the course in non-Euclidean geometry students learned the Poincare disk model of hyperbolic geometry.
Participants in the program find the experience fun, challenging and rewarding. Their responses in the evaluations they fill out at the end of the program are very positive about the experience, and they indicate that for many students the program has a substantial impact on their academic and social development. Many students return for a second summer in the program, and many have ended up at Stanford and other top universities as undergraduates. There is high hope for the academic success of the students who participated this past summer at Stanford with AHPCRC support.