4 Incredible Enrichment Programs For Teens To Explore This Winter

 

Wall Street Virtual Winter Camp Teach Me Wall Street will be offering a two-week Wall Street 101 Investing & Trading Boot Camp from December 20 - 31, 2021. The classes are perfect for High School students. Improve your financial skills with virtual learning Wall Street training classes. Join a MID-WINTER BREAK Camp all about Wall Street. Learn what Wall Street is and how investing can grow your money. Get to know Wall Street - who are the players? What do they do? And how does it all work? The Boot Camp is hands-on, interactive and a lot of fun, teaching important information often not taught in schools.                Learn More »     Juniper Writing Institute @ UMass-Amherst   Juniper Online Winter Workshops: December 27 - 31. When it comes to writing, you have the spark. Juniper looks for writers whose work shows curiosity and risk-taking, and who are eager to experiment with forms and ideas new to them, in the company of their creative peers. Join us online for four days of synchronous, dynamic and participatory learning, sharing, and community building.               Learn More »          Inspirit A.I. Online High School Program by Stanford PhD Students   Inspirit AI offers live online artificial intelligence programs taught by Stanford graduate students. In the 10-session bootcamp, students learn fundamental AI concepts and build a socially impactful project in a domain of their choosing. Inspirit's AI Scholars program is a 10 session (25-hour) live online program that exposes high school students to fundamental AI concepts and guides them to build a socially impactful project in areas including law, healthcare, education, and more. Taught by our team of graduate students from Stanford University, students receive a personalized learning experience in small groups with a student-teacher ratio of 4:1. No coding experience is required, but more experienced students may be placed in an advanced cohort.     Learn More »     Headwaters Science Institute   The Headwaters Research Experience is an engaging three-part extracurricular program that guides students through creating a research project on any topic imaginable. Under the mentorship of a professional scientist, students pose research questions, design a study, and analyze their data. Students emerge from the program with a formal research paper, a finalized research presentation, and increased confidence in their ability to contribute to science in a meaningful way. This program is open to high school students located anywhere with internet access! Our 2022 Spring Research Experience begins in January. We also offer Summer and Fall Research Experience programs! Our Fall Research Experience begins in September, and our Summer Research Experience starts in June.     Learn More »

Horizon Award - Senior Scholarship

 

Thank you for your interest in the Southern Association of College Admission Counseling (SACAC) Horizon Award. Each year SACAC seeks to award five (5) students attending high school in one of the nine member regions or the Caribbean with a $1,000 one-time scholarship. SACAC recognizes the financial barriers students often times face when considering college opportunities and the Horizon Award seeks to off-set some of these cost of living concerns.

As a matching award, a college counselor or Community Based Organization advisor who has been nominated by the chosen students will receive $1,000 to be used towards professional development opportunities, such as conference registration fees, annual membership dues for SACAC, or fees associated with participation in any SACAC event.

Horizon Award applications must be submitted by 11:59 pm on January 18, 2022. All supplementary materials must be submitted no later than January 21 for a student's application to be considered complete.

In order to be considered as an applicant for the Horizon Award, students must be on track to graduate in Spring 2022 from a high school located within one of the SACAC member regions (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, or the Caribbean).

The following items must be submitted for an applicant's file to be considered complete:
- Upload high school transcript
- Upload Résumé/List of Activities
- Personal Essay
- Description of financial need or circumstances
- (Optional) Upload test score(s)
- (Optional) Recommendation Form submitted by teacher, counselor, coach, or community leader (https://forms.gle/H2gxUa9b6dnWp67t8)

Any questions regarding the student application process can be emailed to horizon@sacac.org.

 

Opinion: How to write an interesting college essay from a boring prompt

Taken from CTPost

With the imminent deadline for college applications, students are scrambling to complete the dreaded personal essay. As an instructor of college-level writing, the years I’ve spent teaching students on the other side of the college admission process has left me thinking about what I might say to prospective students.

Essays come in all shapes and sizes — some are breathlessly creative, others poignantly policy-oriented. For me, at least, the best student essays stand out for how well they show the nuances and complexities of how the author thinks.

College essays are difficult to write because they address broad prompts. But if you take time to separate out the parts that comprise the prompt’s implied argument, you might revise the prompt to suit your needs and curiosities. You might create a question that you’d love to answer.

Here’s a prompt: “The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?”

Many students might begin by listing all of the hard times they’ve experienced over the years. But what if you feel you have nothing remarkable to report?

To develop a response, we need to understand what the prompt is asking us to do. At a basic level, the prompt is asking us to take the claim — “The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success” — and supply evidence. But to merely check these formulaic boxes would be a missed opportunity. Rather than listing out experiences that may relate to the prompt, another way to go about prewriting is to perform surgery on the prompt. We can look for what rhetoricians call a warrant: “a general assumption or principle that links the evidence to the claim.” For example, the idea that you need to write a good college essay to get into college assumes, among other things, that you want to go to college.

Playing around with warrants can be fun. For example, a meme about mistakes circulating on the internet shows the picture of an obviously photo-shopped penguin holding two cymbals ready to crash over a sleeping polar bear. The inspirational poster parody reads that, like obstacles: “We learn from our mistakes” and underneath it in smaller font: “Today you will learn a lot.” Of course, the humor of this meme is that the penguin will soon learn the effect of waking a sleeping bear. That lesson, however, won’t serve the penguin for long since waking a predator close by leads to serious trouble. In this humor, we can spot a warrant: there is an expectation that time passes between our mistakes and what we learn. Moreover, there will be future events at which time one can apply this new learning.

The best thing to do with warrants in an argument is to challenge them. What if we don’t learn from obstacles? What if the things we learn now don’t lead to later success? What if they drift into oblivion?

Now it’s your turn: can you think of a time when you didn’t learn from obstacles? What did you learn from the experience of not learning from obstacles? Or, thinking on a broader sociocultural level: If we don’t always learn from obstacles, then why are educational institutions asserting that we could or should learn from obstacles?

The steps are as follows: (1) Challenge the warrant and ask why. (2) Use the questions you come up with like a new prompt. (3) Write an essay that responds to a question for which you do not have an answer at the outset. Write to explore the question and look for answers. One question I’ve wondered about, for example, is “Why is learning from mistakes so fundamental to postsecondary pedagogy in the United States?” Does it always work? Does it ever cause harm?

So before you begin to write your response to the prompts, pause to ask questions back at them. If you find yourself asking a question to which you don’t have an answer, and it’s one that you’d really like to have an answer to, then dive in. Begin free writing. Perhaps you’ll recognize the college essay application process not for what it is but for what it could be: a chance to explore the habits of mind that shape how you understand the world and to nudge readers to question the way they think.

Heather Klemann is a lecturer in the English Department at Yale University.

Carnegie Mellon Pre-College Programs

For over 100 years, Carnegie Mellon has offered students unique and hands-on educational programs from the fine arts to technology and everything in between. Through Carnegie Mellon's Pre-College Programs, rising juniors and seniors in high school have the opportunity to experience a world-class education on a beautiful, vibrant college campus. Our programs prepare them for their upcoming college experience, help them narrow their career focus, and build critical knowledge and skills.

Pre-College Programs* - Summer of 2022
 

• Architecture: Introduces design practice, creative problem solving, and critical thinking through a matrix of programming, celebrating curiosity and providing a strong foundation for architectural education. (4- and 6-week program options)
• Art: Uses both traditional tools and cutting-edge technologies to explore creative ideas in a college-level studio environment. Students develop both conceptual and technical skills preparing them for a wide range of opportunities in both art studies and careers. (3- and 6-week program options)
• Computational Biology: Provides extensive training in both cutting-edge laboratory experiments to generate biological data and the computational analysis of that data. Uses real-world scenarios for exploration. (3-week program)
• Design: Introduces students to the discipline of Design, provides a foundation of skills, and gives a clear idea of what to expect from a college-level accredited program. (6-week program)
• Drama: Prepares students for the college audition and interview process, illustrating the kind of creativity and discipline required of students studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts Drama curriculum. Students you will be introduced to the intensity of a top-rated undergraduate conservatory experience. (6-week program)
   
• Music: Immerses high school students in a world-class conservatory experience within an internationally recognized university. The program mirrors the first weeks of Carnegie Mellon’s first-year undergraduate School of Music curriculum. (3- and 6-week program options)
• National High School Game Academy: Allows high school students to experience modern video game development using industry-standard technology. Students interested in art, music and audio, game design, and software development are encouraged to apply for this interdisciplinary program. (6-week program)
• Summer Session: Provides high school students with the opportunity to take summer courses offered by Carnegie Mellon. Students earn college credit while working in an academic setting that mirrors the supportive, rigorous environment of the first year of college. (6-week program)
• Writing & Culture: Students explore film, art, and culture through historical and contemporary lenses. Students learn to think critically, express thoughts creatively, and write effectively for college and beyond. (6-week program)

*Limited scholarships available for programs above.
 

No-Cost Pre-College Programs - Summer of 2022
 

• AI4All @ Carnegie Mellon: Provides opportunities for students who have been historically excluded in STEM to study artificial intelligence with full-time faculty, staff, and researchers who are leaders in the field. (3-week program) 
• Computer Science Scholars: Provides students who have historically been excluded in the field of computer science an opportunity to explore the field of computer science with full-time faculty, staff and researchers who are leaders in the field.  (4-week program)
• Summer Academy for Math and Science:  Allows students from underrepresented communities to develop a deeper understanding of STEM via traditional classroom instruction, hands-on projects, and sustained engagement with world-renowned faculty and skilled staff mentors. (rising seniors only, 6-week program)
   

To learn more about our programs, please register for one of our information sessions or contact us with questions.

Here is our online application. 

Small Group Classes: Academic Success, Financial Literacy, and Algebra

Method Test Prep's small-group classes are starting soon! Classes meet in a virtual classroom and are recorded for viewing at any time.

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Academic Success Course

In this 9-hour course, we will cover the keys to academic success, providing students with practical, usable insights.

• Learn how to manage your time, even gaining back time you've been wasting
• Understand how to study in the way that's most ideal for your student

Learn methods of planning, focus, and execution that will make you a more effective student.

Financial Literacy Courses
In this 9-hour course, we will cover the fundamentals of personal finance:

• Understanding and managing debt
• Creating and sticking to a simple budget
• Understanding interest and compounding in terms of both debt and investments
• Understanding investment vehicles, including stocks, bonds, and real estate
• Digital (crypto) currencies and the future of finance

...and more

AlgebraCourses
In our 9-hour courses, we review topics typically covered in Algebra 1, including:

• Slopes and intercepts
• Equations of lines
• Slope-intercept form vs standard form vs point-slope form
• Graphing lines
• Systems of equations
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