COSMOS, the California State Summer School for
Mathematics and Science, is a popular four-week research program for high school students. Participants research at one of four University of California campuses and gain exposure to educational and career options in STEM fields.
However, the juniors who attended the camp last summer had mixed reactions, leading some to look for alternative programs next summer.
Junior Katherine Lu researched Nanochemistry and Nanotechnology at COSMOS UCSC this past summer, and while she found the course informative and the community inclusive, she said she “doubts many of the people there will actually use the knowledge later in their careers.”
Lu said the courses were “very specific,” and she believes most nanochemistry participants are probably interested in other aspects of chemistry too, making the program less effective in the long run.
Although COSMOS is popular, receiving 846 applicants to the UCSC campus alone, Lu was not alone in her criticism of the program.
Junior Adrienne Chan also attended COSMOS at UCSC, where she researched the physics of waves and presented on the carbon nanotube radio.
“I really enjoyed the academics and the residential life,” Chan said, “but as minors, adults had to keep an eye on us. After a while it became annoying and felt restrictive at times.”
As a result, Chan found she enjoyed the after-class social free time most when she and her friends spent it in their dorms, without adult supervision.
But the free time Chan did have was limited. Evening activities were usually mandatory, and if students wanted to visit other parts of campus, such as the field or the library, they had to sign up the day before. While Chan contends that as minors, the supervision was necessary, she says that “forced participation made many ‘fun’ events feel like we were constantly being babysat.”
Unlike Chan, junior Shivam Verma said that the academic life was not the main highlight of the program. As a Number Theory and Discrete Math Cluster student at COSMOS UCSC, Verma explored elliptic curve cryptography. His main disappointment was that the program did not involve much research.
Verma found the program to be “less math and more socializing and messing around” outside of lectures. After class, Verma had a lot of time to relax. He played sports, ate ramen noodles and played card games with his friends.
Junior Jeffrey Xu, however, had a more positive outlook on COSMOS, which he attended in the summer of 2017, saying, “COSMOS is a good introductory level program if you’re interested and want to know what research is like.”
Xu went into the program expecting a course rather than an actual research opportunity. Although the program was indeed structured, he found that the activities were “more interactive and hands on” than he had imagined.
Xu also had other positive experiences at COSMOS, such as the chance to visit prominent laboratories like IBM Almaden and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Since attending COSMOS proved that he had experience in a related field, Xu said that COSMOS was a “good stepping stone” that ultimately allowed him to be selected for the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa this summer, where he researched electron beam lithography.
Although Xu said both programs are well organized and interesting, SSTP is more focused on actual individual research, with a specific research question.
Not only did Xu learn a lot about the particulars of science involved in lithography, but he also had experiences that allowed him to grow as a person.
“I learned to get used to failure after failure,” he said. “For the first five weeks, nothing we tried worked, but in the end, we persisted and pulled through and got some good results.”
The research program also helped push Xu to his limits, allowing him to make the most of his summer.
“It was overall a really rewarding experience because I put in a lot of hard work over the course of these six weeks and achieved a lot of things I had never previously imagined I was capable of,” he said.
After his enjoyable experiences at COSMOS and SSTP, Xu said he hopes to get into a nanotechnology or nanofabrication lab next summer.
Another research program, attended by senior Hanlin Sun, was the six-week residential UC Davis Young Scholars Program, where Sun was part of a group of 40 students researching the natural sciences. Since UC Davis was also a COSMOS campus, Sun was able to note some differences between the two camps.
The first half of YSP was composed mainly of lectures by UC Davis professors. The second half was geared toward lab work, where students were assigned to a professor and specific research topic.
At the camp, Sun studied plant pathology, and although he does not necessarily plan to pursue that as a career, the skills Sun learned at YSP are transferable to other fields.
From his observations, Sun found the two programs differed in that COSMOS “is pretty scripted in that they drill in specific skills and try to teach you more of the basics, but for YSP, it was really doing the actual work and helping out the graduate students and the professors with their actual day to day jobs.”
Although it’s not perfect, COSMOS has its advantages, participants said: It provides basic science experience and is a gateway to higher level research programs. But COSMOS is not the only summer research camp option for students: Xu and Sun’s experiences prove that COSMOS, although highly popular in this area, is only one of many possible programs.