The Program That Lets High School Students Dip Their Toes in University Research

Caltech is one of three affiliate universities that support the Summer Science Program (SSP), whose academics are directed by a Caltech alumna and has maintained ties to the Institute for decades.

by Andrew Moseman

High school students may learn about the various kinds of celestial objects in science class, but few, if any, have the chance to plot the exact orbit of a near-Earth asteroid. They may learn the basics of genetics, but they rarely are given the opportunity to design their own experiments.

The Summer Science Program (SSP), which recently concluded its 2023 program, gives more than 200 rising high school seniors from around the country the opportunity to get their feet wet in a working laboratory. Caltech alumna Amy Barr Mlinar (BS ’00), chief academic officer of SSP, says Caltech has maintained connections with the program since SSP’s founding in 1959 and that numerous students who attended SSP have gone on to become Caltech alumni as well.

“SSP offers students the opportunity to ask significant questions and engage in research to find answers,” says Jann Lacoss, associate director of admissions. “They learn key aspects of research that serve them well at Caltech: collaboration, creativity, and resilience. It’s a terrific opportunity for students to see if they actually like doing research—real research—and gives them the chance to work with both peers and professionals.”

Students in the biochemistry program at Purdue University. Photo: SSP

Mlinar participated in SSP in 1994 before attending Caltech for her undergraduate degree, then joined the SSP board in 2004. Other Caltech connections run equally deep, with Institute faculty acting as both SSP faculty and as guest speakers over the decades, including Richard Feynman, who visited nine times between 1960 and 1980. In the late 1990s, SSP alumni, including many Caltech alums, helped to turn the program into the nonprofit it is today—headed by new CEO Frank Steslow and expanding into new areas. And along with Harvey Mudd College and MIT, Caltech is one of three affiliate universities that support SSP.

“It's a highly structured environment that's really intended to give you a taste of what it's like to do research in a university environment,” Mlinar says.

To get that taste, students from around the country were dispersed during June and July to one of five participating university campuses, depending on which subject they studied. Astrophysics students chose a near-Earth asteroid to track and study, then had to submit a request for a telescope just as a professional astronomer would. Biochemistry students learned the fundamentals of enzyme structure, function, and evolution to understand a fungal pathogen that infects crops. In the genomics course, participants learned to stimulate the evolution of antibiotic resistance and then sequenced the genome of the resulting mutations.

Arowyn Casenhiser, a participant in SSP’s 2023 program in genomics and a rising senior from Maryville, Tennessee, knew early on that she loved research. “I remember when I was really little, my dad took me outside, and we got pond water out from down the street, and then we brought it back and put it on a microscope. And I sat there for two hours just looking at this microscope slide and watching these little bacteria move around.”

She participated in the genomics program this summer at the University of Indiana. Once the students learned basic laboratory research skills, such as the proper way to pipette, they performed a project using a simple Raspberry Pi-based system from the Austria-based company Replifactory to monitor antibiotic resistance in a nonpathogenic marine microbe. The students changed the environmental or stress conditions on the microbes, then used genetic sequencing to see how it evolved and whether it developed greater antibiotic resistance.

“It's very fast paced,” Mlinar says. “The research project is intended to be something that they would not have learned in high school in a subject area that they wouldn't have learned at high school and to do something that goes far beyond the high school curriculum.”

It is no surprise these universities maintain connections to SSP, says Mlinar, since the program is good preparation for attending a major research university.

“I know that SSP has a really good reputation in admissions offices at research-intensive universities, and the reason why is because the pace, the level of focus, and the individual attention we put on the students is really similar to what you would get at one of these high-powered schools. If somebody can come to SSP and thrive in that environment, then the university has pretty good confidence that they're going to be able to thrive at that university.”

Casenhiser says that her time in the program was as valuable for the lessons about the culture of a research university as it was for the lessons in lab techniques. In high school, she says, there is so much competition to be at the top of the class for college admissions. At SSP, she expected the same but instead found a group of people dedicated to helping one another succeed.

“I think everybody had a lot of character growth and sort of figured out what their personality is and who they really are outside of just being ‘the smart kid,’” she says. “We found a lot of our individuality over the course of the summer. It was just a really transformative experience to be able to start a program and not really know—are you going to fit in, and is this going to be a good environment for you? And then you just find yourself and find how you fit in with other people over the course of five-and-a-half weeks.”