Located in the heart of New York's Finger Lakes region, on Seneca Lake, the Environmental Studies Summer Youth Institute at Hobart and William Smith Colleges provides exceptional opportunities to explore the scientific, social, and humanistic perspectives of environmental issues.

The Institute offers a two-week, college-level interdisciplinary program for talented high-school students entering their junior and senior years. The program is designed as an introduction to a variety of environmental issues and perspectives on nature and our environment. You will conduct research with faculty members in a variety of locations: on the HWS William F. Scandling (a 65-foot vessel on Seneca Lake), in streams, quaking bogs, the Adirondack Mountains, and the Colleges science laboratories. Working in the field, in laboratories, in classrooms, and on a four-day camping trip, you will explore a range of topics in environmental policy, economics, and ethics, and come to see the natural world through the eyes of artists, historians, philosophers, and scientists. You will have the opportunity to work closely with Hobart and William Smith faculty members in small groups, conducting hands-on research with first-rate equipment, and learning individually and collectively in a rigorous yet noncompetitive atmosphere. A love of nature, learning, and the outdoors provides the focus for this unique educational experience.

At the Institute, you will come to have a broad understanding of the forces that affect the environment and our relationship to the world in which we live. The environmental issues that confront us as we enter the 21st Century are complicated indeed, and solutions will not come from politicians or scientists alone. A collaborative effort the likes of which we have never before seen holds our only hope for a brighter future. You will leave the Institute with the knowledge and tools to continue your exploration of these issues on a new level. Both faculty members and students will bring to the Institute their unique strengths, backgrounds, and interests. We will learn together.  For many, the Institute will offer a unique opportunity to explore a variety of familiar and new disciplines. You will discover connections and differences among geoscience, biology, chemistry, mathematics, political science, economics, anthropology, art, literature, and philosophy. This will be valuable preparation for college, and may help you focus future study. The central theme of the program will be the environment, and you will come to see many connections and differences among the ways our faculty members approach the issue. The faculty will have the interesting challenge of leading you through this interdisciplinary program, but the experience will be uniquely yours.

For the summer of 2009, ESSYI will run from July 12th through July 25th.

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