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

Data science is a fast developing science of extracting meaningful information from massive data for better decision-making. It is interdisciplinary by nature, involving statistics, computing, and domain knowledge. Important principles of data science will be elaborated through interactive games and real applications in this course.

Students will have a basic understanding of the essential components of data science as well as the basic computing skills needed to explore this field further independently. The fun, game-based introductions will engage students' interest in data science.

• understand most important principles in data science;
• learn the basics of data science computing skills - data manipulation, visualization, and analysis;
• program in R to run simulations of games;
• practice on real applications with data from climate change to sports.

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

Prerequisites: Two years of High School Science and Math through Algebra II  with a grade of C or higher

Marine scientist strive to understand the properties of the ocean and coastal waters. This understanding will allow us to make decisions about how to protect marine life and sustain ocean resources. To do this, marine scientists make observations and collect data on plant and animal diversity, ocean temperatures, currents, chemistry, and geology.

This hands-on course will have you making these same observations both out on the Long Island Sound (LIS), along the shore, in the laboratory and on the computer. Over the week you will study fish diversity in a nearby cove and marine invertebrate inhabitants of our rocky intertidal as well as seagrass and seaweed populations. You will conduct plankton tows and study our campus tidal pools. Dissections and laboratory experiments will inform you about the physiology and adaptations of local marine animals. We will collect data on the chemical and physical environment using instrumentation and sensors. Highlights of the hands-on nature of the course are listed below.

By the end of the week you will have learned and worked with many different types of equipment and instruments. You will conducted lab work and instrumental analysis. However, the key to being a good scientist is to be curious and ask good questions. You will use math, test hypothesis and apply reasoning to interpret your data and explain your observations. You can then begin to answer some of these questions and generate new ones. This is the foundation of marine ecology. We will be using this approach throughout the week. Finally, we will converge all our topics, data and observations to develop a better appreciation of the marine environment and create a sustainability plan for eastern LIS. This will also involve the critical thinking which we will have incorporated throughout the week as well as creativity.

Our goals for you are:

1. That you leave the program with a better understanding of how scientists discover and explain the workings of the natural world
2. That you learn how oceanography helps us to appreciate and manage our planet’s resources
3. To understand that marine ecology is the interaction of marine organisms with each other as well as their physical and chemical environment
4. To appreciate that the survival of marine life depends upon our stewardship of the oceans
5. 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

Tiffany Hoxie, MSMOL (She/Her)

Assistant Director of Leadership and Organizational Development

Tiffany Hoxie began her journey in education 18 years ago, working primarily in Youth Development and Early Childhood Education.  Tiffany holds an associate degree in early childhood education and a bachelor's degree in child studies.  Invested in the non-profit sector while in college, Tiffany climbed the ladder to Director of Education with the Boys & Girls Club organization, where the passion and desire for working with underserved and often unseen communities was born.  This is also the time when the seed for leadership and organizational development was planted.

Tiffany achieved a Master of Management and Organizational Leadership in 2015, and that time, the pivot into higher education and entrepreneurship occurred.  She pursued an entrepreneurial path that focused on “quality educational services from baby and beyond”.  Additionally, she was the Assistant Director of Early Childhood and Child Studies programs at a state university, and currently serves as the Assistant Director of Leadership and Organizational Development at UConn. In this role, she teaches UNIV courses, facilitates career and leadership workshops, and serves as a support for students.

In addition to her role at UConn, she is an adjunct professor at external colleges, focusing on courses related to childhood education as well as business. Tiffany is passionate about ensuring that all students have access to a quality and equitable education.

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

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!

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.

• Students will become better writers, more independent, more creative, and more original.
• Students will 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.
• Share writing with one another both for revision and entertainment.
• Play around with some multimodal forms of composition.

Katie Grant is a Training and Organizational Development Specialist with the Connecticut Education Association, where she works to support the advancement of the teaching profession, as well as the experiences of students in schools, across the state. She was previously a high school English teacher and UConn ECE Experience Instructor as well as program staff for UConn Pre-College Summer. Katie loves all things in teaching and learning—and especially all things relating to the teaching and learning of reading and writing. As a high school teacher, Katie was focused on creating student leadership opportunities through directing her school's yearbook program and writing center.