Imagine spending the day studying Kazakh, Kazakhstan’s official language, the physics of Apocalypse, and cryptozoology, a study on weird creatures of the world.
Some Northwestern students will spend this Saturday teaching more than 400 high school students from the Chicago area about these subjects and more through NU Splash!
Liza Plotnikov, a second-year doctoral student in McCormick, introduced the idea for NU Splash! last year from a similar program she participated in as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The number of high school participants increased from around 80 last year, and the students represent more than 39 high schools in the Chicago area.
Classes are held between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. Each student has to pay $10 for class supplies and lunches. Any NU student, undergraduate or graduate, can offer classes, and students this year submitted more classes than the program could fit. Plotnikov narrowed the submissions down to 62 unique classes.
Plotnikov said she enjoys the program because students realize learning is fun, particularly if the subject is interesting.
“On the day of the program, when the kids show up and they’re just really excited to give up their Saturdays to essentially be in school, it makes me very happy,” she said.
NU Splash! differs from the program at MIT because it does more outreach to underprivileged schools, whereas most students participating in the program at MIT come from middle-class suburbs of Boston, Plotnikov said. For example, NU Splash! offers busing to several schools serving generally underprivileged neighborhoods in Chicago.
The NU program also stands out because it draws students who live as many as three hours apart from each other and may not have the same access to extracurricular programs, said Amy Estersohn, a volunteer who has taught for NU Splash! last year and has been involved with other Splash programs nationwide.
“These are students who are so geographically far from each other and go to very different kinds of schools, and here they are going to spend a day together discussing the philosophy of video games or learning how to do street drumming,” Estersohn said. “I get very excited that students from different backgrounds are able to share their love of education and do something that’s so wildly different from any high school experience.”
High school participants can also learn about science and engineering courses at the college level, said Adam Jakus, a first-year doctoral student in McCormick, who is teaching at Splash 2011 this year after participating in similar programs at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“The students can come here and see that if they go to college, they can use one of these million-dollar instruments in their first year of college if they choose to go into science or engineering. I think it’s enlightening for them,” said Jakus, who will be teaching a course on what materials look like under high-power microscopes.
High school students also realize college programs encourage creativity and are not simply a continuation of high school, he said.
“They had originally thought that science or engineering is boring or college is for nerds,” he said. “They realized that you can do science or engineering, have a good time and not necessarily be a nerd too.”
