After attending my summer program, I felt more assured that engineering was a field is want to go into, and it helped narrow down my interests to Civil Engineering.
The program started out with a awesome introduction ceremony where we worked with our roommates to figure out the heat capacity of the ocean and how much potential energy there would be if the temperature changed by 1 degree Celsius. After that, we did bonded with our YESS (Young Engineering Science Scholars) groups focusing on our majors with competitions. We had to create a chant and act out a machine in a charade for the judges to guess. My group as assigned to act out a vending machine, and in the final ceremony it was reveled we won the Machine challenge! We were all given Uconn Engineering Baseball caps as an award.
Everyday as a group in a "major" we would participate in extra activities correlating to what our group was focused on. Mine was Civil and Environmental engineering. Some of these programs were planning out different design layouts for cities and their transportation systems, creating concrete Lego bricks, or making solar powered fuel cells! Beyond these groups, we got to participate in different lectures from the professors of the engineering school about a different type of engineering. I discovered types of engineering I wasn't aware of before like Material Science engineering. Paired witht he lectures we experienced tours of the families each engineering discipline uses, and a lab we got to participate in. Some of these labs were fun activities like when we froze marshmallows using liquid Nitrogen, while others were like the catapult competition. This competition was a ton of fun for me, not only did you have to design your own catapult, you had to make it as cost effective as possible. Rather than assign a certain amount of materials, they had set up a store where you would go and purchase materials to use instead.
The final day, every student participated in their major's group in the physics olympics which featured challenges from every discipline such as a bridge competition where you stack bricks out as far as you could without letting one end of the bride shape touch the ground.
Overall, this was a great experience! I loved every second of it from sitting in college lecture halls, to working hands on with concrete. I'm very grateful for everyone who helped get me to the Explore Engineering Program. This has directly influenced my thoughts of where I want to go when I am older and set my down my life path. Thank you for everyone for giving me his opportunity!

I am going to be participating in UCONN’s Explore Engineering program this summer. I am beyond excited to go to this program as it well let me venture into multiple fields of engineering as find the one that fits me the best. Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible! There are not many opportunities for high school students to look into engineering from a college-level, so I believe that this program will help develop me as a student a well as motivate me to continue looking into engineering as a viable choice.
I can’t wait to meet the other students who are looking into Engineering, and collaborate with them. I choose this program because for a while now I have been looking into going for Engineering as a college student and as a career field. It’s my hope that attending Explore Engineering will let me decide fully if I’d like to go into engineering later on in life.