On July 28, the College will begin the third and final session of Summer Scholars, an inaugural pre-college program aimed at providing high school students with the opportunity to experience Dartmouth academics.
Launched on June 30 and running until Aug. 9, the program will bring 165 high school students to campus over three two-week sessions. Participants engage in non-credit courses taught by Dartmouth instructors, including faculty, staff and alumni. During their session, the students live in dedicated residence halls, eat in the College’s dining facilities and have free time to participate in out-of-classroom activities, according to Dartmouth Summer Scholars program leader Christine Parker.
“Since the courses do not have curriculum requirements, [the College] is able to produce really interesting courses … that are responsive to changing academic fields and cutting edge research,” Parker said.
According to chief transformation officer LaMar Bunts, the Summer Scholars program falls under College President Sian Leah Beilock’s “Five Areas of Focus” — a proposal to further Dartmouth’s mission of discovery and leadership that she announced in her inaugural address.
“That focus [that Summer Scholars falls under] is called ‘Dartmouth for Life,’ and it enables Dartmouth to have impact across various phases of a learner’s educational journey — not only while pursuing their degree,” Bunts wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth. “In this case, the scholars are high-achieving rising 10-12th graders.”
Applicants must submit test scores, transcripts and short answer responses to gain admission, The Dartmouth reported on April 19. Once admitted, tuition costs $7,999 per session. According to Parker, the program’s pilot year lacks a formal financial assistance program but has offered aid “through partnerships with community-based organizations like Minds Matter or Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.”
According to Parker, Dartmouth Summer Scholars and Summer Discovery — a company that works with universities to provide pre-college summer programs — matched funds received by students from community-based organizations to cover the full cost of the program. According to the Summer Scholars website, Dartmouth partnered with Summer Discovery to produce the program.
“We are definitely focusing on ways to increase [the Summer Scholars] internal scholarship fund to help more students who aren’t necessarily part of a community-based organization also attend the program,” Parker said.
In addition to financial aid, Parker said Summer Discovery staff also supports students by living in residence halls, accompanying groups of students to the gym and organizing optional activities.
Students who participated in the first session had the chance to sing karaoke, hike parts of the Appalachian Trail and participate in an “Olympic field day,” according to Parker. In their free time, students can also go to designated areas of campus — including Main Street and the Green — in small groups of at least three, she added.
Beyond optional activities, students spend around five hours per day in class, according to the program’s website.
Summer 2024 course offerings include classes on business, entrepreneurship, data science, medicine, creative writing, design thinking and the politics of memory and museums, according to the program webpage. Students can only take one course per session, to which they apply directly, Parker said.
“Business Foundations,” taught by Tuck Bridge fellow manager Patroklos Karantinos, is offered in all three sessions and emphasizes learning “by doing,” Karantinos said.
The course is designed around a real-life company valuation group project and aims to build students’ accounting and financial literacy, according to Karantinos.
“I believe that students accomplished what they came here for — which was an exposure to business skills — while also working on related skills like communications, product management and group work,” Karantinos said.
Adam Dockstader, a rising senior at Kentucky Country Day School in Louisville, Ky., participated in session two of “Business Foundations” and is hoping to study “business, finance or economics” in college, he said.
“I think if you’re engaged you can really get a lot out of the class,” Dockstader said. “The material was really good — this past summer I interned at an investment firm and all of this information would have been really useful to know before.”
While “Business Foundations” is taught in all three sessions, other courses — such as “The New Essentials of Medicine” — are offered during only select two-week periods. The course, which was offered during the first session, was co-taught by anthropology professor Elizabeth Carpenter-Song and director of the new Dartmouth Foundations in Health Care initiative Manish Mishra and “centered around humanistic inquiry,” according to the program website.
The 12 students enrolled in “The New Essentials of Medicine” met with admissions officers at the Geisel School of Medicine, engaged with educational materials at the Hood Museum of Art and reflected on their learning through poetry instruction guided by writer and poetry instructor Elizabeth Libbey MacLeish, Carpenter-Song said.
“We leaned heavily into this overarching theme of building skills of attunement and attention, which requires really slowing down and paying close attention to listen deeply,” Carpenter-Song said.
The course “Data Science” — offered in the first and third sessions — is co-taught by biomedical data science lecturer Carly Bobak and senior director of research computing and biomedical data science lecturer Christian Darabos.
Jane Huang ’25, a data science summer intern and teaching assistant for the course, works with Bobak and Darabos under Dartmouth’s Research Information, Technology and Consulting department. Huang said the program has been “very rewarding so far” and that “she has loved getting to know all of the students.”
Students enrolled in “Data Science” visited RITC’s Augmented and Virtual Reality lab and “tried out” the VR headsets, Huang said.
Moving forward, the program is looking at how it can bring “a very distinct Dartmouth sensibility” to the courses offered, Parker said.
“Part of that is embracing subject areas … that Dartmouth is particularly strong in and thinking about how we can incorporate the outdoors into our pre-college program,” Parker said.
She added that the Summer Scholars program has tentative plans to pilot an outdoor education module next summer.
“To build in some meaningful engagement with the outdoors into the program is a goal of mine,” Parker said. “I think it would be a very unique attribute that only [Dartmouth’s pre-college program] would offer.”
Pre-collegiate programs often reflect the “personality of the institution,” according to Parker. For example, the University of Chicago — where Parker previously worked — offers for-credit pre-college programs. Stanford University — where Parker worked for nearly 10 years as the director of pre-college programs — offers programs that focus on “academic enrichment.”
The first Summer Scholars session began on June 30 and concluded on July 12. The second session ran from July 14 to July 26, and the third will conclude on Aug. 9
Correction Appended (July 26, 2:29 p.m.): A previous version of this article said students reflected on their learning through poetry instruction guided by Geisel medical education scholar Colin McLeish. However, students were led by writer and poetry instructor Elizabeth Libbey MacLeish. The article has been corrected.
Correction Appended (July 29, 12:17 p.m.): A previous version of this article said the first session concluded on July 26th. However, it concluded on July 12th. The article has been corrected.
Correction Appended (July 29, 12:21 p.m.): The article has been updated to reflect Manish Mishra's affiliation with the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
