Students (and educators) too often regard the essay as merely an instrument of assessing learning, but the essay has a rich history as a creative genre. In this course we will approach the essay as the creative, dynamic, imaginative literary form that it actually is. Your approach to writing essays will not be the same and you'll never go back to the five paragraph essay again! We will look at examples of the essay, use film for inspiration, and play with other means of creativity.

You will leave this course with a very different and improved understanding of the essay, and you will be better writers. The essays you write in the future may challenge some of your teachers’ more conventional expectations, but they will be better, more interesting, and more like the real writing professional essayists actually create. Your professors in college will be grateful.

• Become better writers, more independent, more creative, and more original.
• Choose topics of interest, explore genres of writing, develop their own voice, and write!
• Learn a little bit about the history of the essay as a literary genre.
• Read a variety of essays form a variety of essayists.
• Experiment with writing different kinds of essays, such as personal essays, op-eds, commentaries, and rants.
• Use film to inspire analysis and writing.
• Share writing with one another both for revision and entertainment.
• Play around with some multimodal forms of composition.

Prerequisites: Eligible for students that are accepted and have committed to the HRCH program

Human Rights Close to Home (HRCH) offers high school student fellows leadership development through a one-year, stipend-supported program. Student fellows learn and share human rights knowledge and civic engagement skills in order to plan and implement civic actions in their own communities. Students from across the state of Connecticut are welcome to apply.

Up to twenty Connecticut high school student fellows will participate in a one-week residential leadership institute focused on human rights and civic engagement. You will explore human rights issues, considering how they relate to your own lives, and develop knowledge and skills to contribute to civic action projects in your home communities. K-12 teachers from across Connecticut will learn about human rights and civic engagement alongside you throughout the week. You will learn from HRCH staff as well as human rights faculty and staff, community based organizations, and youth activists.

After the summer institute, working in teams or individually during the school year, you will engage in a human rights-based civic action project. Receiving close guidance and supervision from HRCH staff, college student mentors (undergraduate or graduate students), and community mentors, you will learn about local human rights issues, gain practical experience, and develop valuable skills you can apply to future human rights and civic engagement work. You will return to UConn 2-4 times throughout the year to meet with the other student fellows and work on your civic action projects.

HRCH is working in close partnership with UConn Pre-College Summer (PCS). PCS will support Connecticut high school students during the HRCH Summer Institute on the UConn Storrs Campus,

• About human rights and human rights violations
• How to take action to promote human rights
• Practice taking action for human rights with support from HRCH staff as well as other HRCH participants
• Meet with community based organizations, youth activists, UConn faculty, and government leaders
• Visit a human rights site off campus
• Join a growing community of human rights and civic action leaders in Connecticut

Multimedia Journalism will introduce students to news reporting, interviewing and storytelling skills for print, broadcast and digital news outlets. Students will learn how to interview people, uncover news, separate fact from fiction, and engage a digital audience in a rapidly changing online environment. Veteran journalists who are experts in the fields of reporting, writing, audio, visuals, and audience engagement will lead students in training workshops to help them develop effective writing, research, and photography skills, and expose them to best practices for data visualizations and social media. Students also will visit a television news station to get a behind-the-scenes look into a daily newscast and meet UConn Journalism alumni working in the field. It will be an exciting introduction to nonfiction storytelling and the chance to learn techniques useful not only in the journalism field, but are must-haves in public relations, marketing and communications.

Students from diverse economic and racial backgrounds will learn about current events, the role of the news media, news judgement and journalism ethics. They will be introduced to nonfiction storytelling and give tools to sharpen their writing, research, and critical-thinking skills. Effective writing is the foundation of communication, and this course will help students communicate more effectively and clearly in their written work in the classroom and/or workplace. Journalism skills are necessary not only for reporters and editors but for those seeking to go into communications, public relations and marketing fields. Students will also gain experience using multimedia tools to gather and report news for publication on various platforms.

• What is news and how you can find it.
• How a reporter can best present a nonfiction story.
• Multimedia:
  • Photography: Tools and tricks for creating a well-composed photo
  • Audio and Video: Best practices & editing techniques
  • Data Visualization: How to turn numbers into an understandable graphic
  • Social media
• Field trip to a television news station in the Hartford area
• Ethics in a “citizen journalist” world

A planet’s climate is primarily driven by the energy received from its Sun, which varies with latitude, season, and orbit. The complex interplay between the energy influx and atmosphere, ocean, and land has made Earth a unique planet with stable climate conditions for hundreds of millions of years. This long-term stability has allowed plants and animals to flourish, including humans! What sustained Earth’s temperate climate? What do projections say about future climate? How do we make climate predictions? How likely are our predictions to become reality? This summer experience program will guide you through building a computer model to answer these questions. This class will provide an immersive and interactive learning experience.

This course will prepare you for continued learning in disciplines such as earth and environment sciences, political science, and social justice in college. More specifically, upon completion of this course you will be able to:

• Explain the unique nature of ongoing climate change in the context of Earth’s climate history
• Make sense of climate projections
• Be able to conduct basic statistical analysis with a computer language

• Model Earth’s energy balance, greenhouse effect, and feedbacks that drive planetary temperature evolution
• Model the carbon cycle and the evolution of CO2 in the atmosphere
• Estimate how temperature may evolve following different future socioeconomical development scenarios
• Analyze climate simulations and assess their uncertainty

Ever get a feeling of Déjà vu? What happens when we confront something new? how do we tell if we’ve seen something before? In this introduction to the field of Behavioral Neuroscience course, Professor Markus will show you that what we think we see, hear and remember can have little to do with the physical reality. Professor Markus will guide you through fascinating human and animal research including responses of individual brain cells to changes in the world around us.

Students will be exposed to lively discussion, video clips, in-class activities, and a chance to analyze data, in order to come away with a better understanding of how our brains process information about the world.

Excellent for students interested in Psychology, Cognitive Sciences, and Medicine.

• Discover that what we think we see, hear and remember can have little to do with the physical reality.
• Lively discussion, video clips, in-class activities
• Get a chance to analyze real data

1. To appreciate how it is all connected - that the marine environment is influenced by our local watersheds, marshes and estuaries
2. To understand that marine ecology is the interaction of marine organisms with each other and their physical and chemical environment
3. To learn the ways that marine organisms must constantly adapt to their changing environment
4. To experience how scientists are working to protect and conserve marine life
5. To learn how to synthesize and present data to make informed decisions about conservation
6. To always be curious and think critically

• You will learn the properties of marine waters using instrumentation and laboratory experiments.
• Small boat trips are used for observation of eel grass beds and seaweed distribution.
• Fish seining and plankton tows will give you further information about biodiversity in eastern LIS.
• Dissections of fresh and preserved specimens will inform you about animal adaptations.
• Influence of environmental parameters on animal physiology will be studied through laboratory experiments.

Leadership Style and Skill Development is a course designed specifically for high school students enrolled in UConn's Pre- College Summer program. Throughout the course, students will engage in group discussions, lectures, leadership development activities, class projects, a challenge course, and hear from guest speakers. The course’s aim is to create and enhance awareness of student’s personal leadership strengths, unique styles, values, identities, as well as group dynamics and effective communication. This course will challenge students to think of their personal styles, as well as to think critically about their role as leader in the current and future spaces.

• Group work and individual reflection
• Low stakes public speaking and intrapersonal communication activities
• Leadership simulations
• Soft and hard skill development activities

Everyone tells you that STEM education is important and that being a scientist, engineer or doctor is an excellent career path. Most people know Engineers build stuff and doctors heal people but what do scientists (specifically chemists) do? We’ll use each session to carry out fun hands on experiments that show different career paths open to chemists or other basic science majors.

There are hundreds of career paths you can follow as a science major. Helping sick people is a noble profession but it isn't for everyone. When you finish the course we hope you will have a better idea of some of the professions that STEM classes can prepare you for.

• Pharmaceuticals: Aspirin synthesis
  • Chemists do drug synthesis
• Natural products and pigments: Ultramarine- making one of the most expensive paints
  • Chemists make all of your favorite colors
• Metallurgy: The golden penny experiment
  • Chemists use metals for all sorts of things
• Innovative materials: Superconductor synthesis and things that glow
  • Chemists developed all of your LEDs and OLED screens.
• Cosmetics: The chemistry of scents
  • Chemists were involved if it smelled good or was a pretty color. Chemists also make lots of things that look like mud and smell bad.
• Food: Molecular gastronomy and artificial flavors in food.
  • Chemists had something to do with all those ingredients on a food package that you can’t pronounce.

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously stated that “the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” In accordance with this observation, our Pre-Law course provides high school students with both academic and practical understandings of the law, legal education, and operations of the American criminal and civil justice systems as well as appellate processes. This course may be of particular interest to aspiring legal professionals as well as to those who have a curious interest in current legal issues.

Students leave this course prepared to enter a pre-law program at the college level with a more comprehensive understanding of legal theory, constitutional rights, as well as formal and informal systems for resolving disputes in the United States. Participation in simulations throughout the week bolster public-speaking skills. Engaging conversations centering on current legal issues feed each participant's intellectual curiosity.

• Study theories of the law and the U.S. Constitution
• Experience legal education by being a law student for a day during our visit to the UConn School of Law
• Observe the American criminal justice system in action by visiting a local courthouse and meeting with real-life judges and prosecutors
• Assess current issues relating to the civil justice justice system, particularly in relation to environmental litigation
• Participate in the appellate process by way of a Moot Court simulation based on a highlighted case in constitutional law