Each summer, faculty and staff invite high school students onto campus for very different pre-college experiences – from theater and health careers to sustainable innovation and data journalism. Better yet, the programs serve a dual purpose: students who come to college for a few weeks of summer are more likely to enroll for four years of their lives.
The challenge wasn’t coming up with something worth teaching. It was everything that happens after class ends. Running a residential program for teenagers means transportation, overnight supervision, trained staff, medical support, schedules, meals, communication, and a hundred small decisions that academic departments weren’t necessarily built to handle.
So Lewis & Clark kept ownership of the programs, and we became the infrastructure underneath them. Working alongside their Camp Directors, our team serves as an embedded program director. Before students arrive, we take staff and faculty through a shared “Camp in a Box” training – walking through a typical week, talking through scenarios, and making sure the academic and residential sides of camp feel like one program.
Then the college gets to focus on what only it can provide: faculty, classrooms, curriculum, and a real college environment. We help take care of the rest. For students, that means something bigger than attending a summer class. They eat in the dining hall, navigate campus, meet new people, spend nights away from home, and get a little taste of the independence that comes with college.
For some of them, that may be the first time a college campus stops feeling like a place they might visit someday and starts feeling like a place they could actually belong.