News Release
in Summer Program Johns Hopkins HeadsUP Introduces Young People to Robotics, Bridge Building, Circuitry For 57 high-school students from the metropolitan Washington, D.C., region, the summer of 2004 will be remembered as a season of discovery, in which they learned from Johns Hopkins University instructors how to construct robotic mousetraps, design circuit boards, build spaghetti bridges and use computers to model parts of the human body. Having spent two days a week for seven weeks taking college-level courses through HeadsUP (Hopkins Engineering ADvanced Summer University Program), these high school students will return to classes in September with a better understanding of how they, as future engineers, can shape the world. HeadsUP, based at Johns Hopkins' Montgomery County Campus in Rockville, is also open to early college students. For Doug Farquhar, an 11th grader at St. Albans School in Washington, the hour and a half each way he drives to Rockville is worthwhile because the program satisfies an "intellectual curiosity that my school can't fill, introduces me to other people with the same disposition, and gives purpose to an otherwise meaningless summer." Nishant Jian, a senior this fall at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, says the introduction to electrical and computer engineering has opened his mind "to the vast field of engineering, while teaching me exactly what it takes to succeed in this chosen field." Fifteen-year-old Victor Roy, who attends Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, says he feels like a "working college student" in the program. He feels lucky to be able to get "a feel for college life, and to have a HeadsUP internship working side-by-side with scientists in a real lab." Nick Raithel, a senior this fall at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, can't think of a better way to spend his summer. "Rather than forcing students to put their dreams of a career in engineering on hold, the HeadsUP program gives us the opportunity to immerse ourselves in our discipline for seven weeks," Raithel said. "It gives high schoolers a chance to live their dreams at an age in which most of their peers are not even thinking about their futures." To learn more about the projects HeadsUP students are working on, for pictures of the completed projects, such as the spaghetti bridges, or to attend a HeadsUP Lab, contact Richard Scott at (301) 294-7170. HeadsUP offers seven-week summer introductory engineering and bioscience college credit courses and possible internships to qualified high school juniors and seniors and early college students. Courses are held at the Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus. For more information on HeadsUP, contact Richard Scott or visit www.headsup.jhu.edu.
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