Boundless opportunities for K-12 students this summer

While summer break for most middle and high schoolers elicits visions of whiling away hours and fun in the sun, several area students are planning to dedicate 40 hours a week or more to the CU Pre-Health Scholars Program at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.

“The summer is jam-packed with intense programming,” said Dominic Martinez, senior director of the Office of Inclusion and Outreach at CU Anschutz. “Sometimes the students are there until 7 o’clock at night, working in the computer labs, getting their homework done.” The program itself is year-round, he said, but slows to one Saturday a month during the academic school year.

“These are our first-gen, low-income students,” explained Abenicio Rael, assistant director of the Office of Inclusion and Outreach/program director of CU Pre-Health Scholars Program at CU Anschutz. “Some of them don’t have access to computers at home or have access to printing. They’re on campus doing the work.”

Dominic Martinez, senior director of the Office of Inclusion and Outreach at CU Anschutz.

Students take part in wide-ranging learning opportunities, including a pharmacy class, where they engage in hands-on activities with the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Martinez and Rael also are planning a summer professionalism workshop for the high schoolers that will involve undergraduates from the Undergrad Pre-Health Program at CU Anschutz. “Our undergraduates will serve as mentors for our high school-age students,” Martinez explained.

And that’s not all.

Abenicio Rael, assistant director of the Office of Inclusion and Outreach/Program director of CU Pre-Health Scholars Program at CU Anschutz

New this year, students will take part in a health disparities course that requires them to return to their communities and research a local issue, then create a final project.

“We have partnered with the CU Denver campus’s College of Arts and Media to produce a final project,” Martinez said. “We’re using a current graduate student from that program who will help students learn how to index, a way of looking at social issues and ‘empowering students to impact their community’ from the student perspective.”

The projects will culminate with the students presenting their projects in their own communities as well as at a showcase on campus in the early fall.

But wait, there’s more.

“The thing about summer that I think the students enjoy the most is the human anatomy class because they get to do a lot of dissecting,” Rael said. “It will be a lot of animal specimens this year and through our partnership with Colorado AHEC we will be able to get them in the actual anatomy lab, using the actual pathology buckets this fall.”

The program curriculum assists students in required college prep – currently they prepare for the ACT test (which will soon be changed to the SAT) and take courses for credit.

“Some other classes for this summer for our rising seniors – our current juniors – is they get to take a college English class and they earn college credit for that. In the fall they’ll be taking other college courses as well,” Rael said.

The CU Pre-Health Scholars Program accepts 65 students per grade level and has grown so popular that the program must turn students away.

“For the most part we get students from Aurora Public Schools, Denver Public Schools, JeffCo, and the Adams school districts. We’ve even had a student come all the way from Erie to be part of it,” Rael said.

Students who apply must have a 3.0 GPA with academic strength in math, English and science, he said. And then they have to be interviewed.

“We review transcripts pretty closely,” Rael said. “We just want to make sure that they understand the program policies and the commitment – what they’re getting themselves into.”

In the past, funding has been only for 10th- through 12th-graders, they said. But now – with additional funding from the CU Office of the President and community partnerships – Martinez and Rael are taking the programs a couple years further.

“With the summer funding, we’ll start our program at eighth grade – I’m super excited about that,” Rael said.

“We’ve had a pilot program for six years, but now with the additional funding we’re able to enhance the programming and we’re spreading it out to other middle schools in other districts,” Martinez said. “So we’re able to take more students who will feed now into the CU Pre-Health Scholars Program.”

Participants can start at eighth grade, they’ll go through until they graduate as high school seniors, then move into the Undergraduate Pre-Health Program, he said. “From that program, they’ll go through their undergraduate and then into a professional program.”

Martinez said another important aspect of the program and the students’ success is parental engagement.

“Abenicio and his staff have been able to really integrate the parent component. It’s working with parents in workshops, preparing the students and parents for the transition into college at the same time,” he said.

The CU Pre-Health Scholars Program is part of CU’s larger Pre-Collegiate Program. And it’s only one of many educational summer offerings across CU’s campuses. Here are some others:

CU-Boulder

• Summer Music Academy: An opportunity for high school and middle school band, orchestra, choir, piano and jazz musicians from Colorado and around the country to receive world-class instruction in a one-week summer session.
• Colorado Shakespeare Festival Summer Camps: Summer camps for kids and teens on the CU-Boulder campus to expand their understanding of Shakespeare through engagement and practice.
• University of Colorado Museum of Natural History: Elementary school-age students meeting Friday mornings to explore and create. The latest exhibit, Becoming Butterflies, is a jumping-off point to cross-pollinate science and art. 
• Colorado Athletics Summer Sports Camps: Colorado Athletics offers a wide variety of summer camps during the spring and summer months. Camps are available in football, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, volleyball, tennis, golf and skiing. 

CU Colorado Springs

• STEM by Me: A program for students entering grades three through five. It offers four, weeklong summer STEM camps (half-day), and Saturday MindQuest workshops throughout the school year.
• FLITE: For grades six through 10, FLITE is a collection of weeklong summer opportunities for students to engage in a hands-on science and technology project of their choosing alongside industry professionals or graduate students in that field
• Seeker: For students grades six through 10, who work with a team to design a competitive Rube Goldberg contraption (like the game Mousetrap), then draft and print individual 3-D components.

CU Denver

• LYNX National Arts & Media Camps: Two week summer arts camps for high school students in four different program areas: Music Industry, Photography, Movie Production, and Digital Animation/Motion Graphics. 
• Denver Writing Project:  The Young Writers Camp and Events at CU Denver is a fun-filled week where fourth- through 12th-grade writers explore and develop their creative writing abilities. 
• Colorado Student Leaders Institute:  COSLI is a four-week summer residential immersion collegiate academic experience that supports students as they transition from high school to the rigor and freedom offered in a college or university setting.

CU Anschutz

• The Denver STaRS: This program provides positive exposure to the CU Anschutz Medical Campus for junior and senior high school students just beginning to explore career and education options in clinical translational science and biomedical fields.
• hPod: hPod is a daylong, pre-health and research profession program open to any middle school and high school students participating in one of the Pre-Collegiate programs offered by any campus in the CU system.