Overview
The Summer Science Program is a residential course with students staying at either the campus of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California or the campus of New Mexico Tech in Socorro, New Mexico. The program at each campus serves 36 students with 8 staff. The curriculum is very similar at the two campuses, but the individual academic directors can vary the curriculum at each campus somewhat. The program also includes many extracurricular activities, field trips (scientific and recreational), and guest lectures from working scientists and other professionals. Guest speakers have included Maarten Schmidt, who has done pioneering work in quasars; the late Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate in physics; James Randi, magician and debunker of pseudoscience; Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development; and Paul MacCready, creator of the Gossamer Condor and Gossamer Albatross.
The students (broken into teams consisting of three students on each team) participate in a five to six-week curriculum where they attend daytime lectures on astronomy, physics, spherical trigonometry, calculus, and software development. The other part of the course happens at night with hands-on work imaging the asteroids they are to study with telescopes made available by the program. From these images, students measure the asteroids' positions and calculate their orbit.
Primarily juniors (rising seniors) who are taking calculus or pre-calculus are admitted, but a few sophomores are selected each year. Participants are chosen based on applications they submit. The cost for students (as of 2012) is $3,950 including room & board, some or all of which can be covered by further needs-based financial aid. The remainder of the costs of the Summer Science Program is funded by alumni contributions.
In 1991, the National Academies' Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications observed that "All participants go on to college. About 37 percent of the pre-1985 graduates are now working in science and medicine, and 34 percent in engineering, mathematics, and computer science (including the founder of Lotus Development Corporation)."
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