During my summer holidays, I sent an application to join the 2 weeklong Honors Aggie STEM Camp at Texas A&M. I was interested in this camp because I’m interested in going to A&M for my University degree and I wanted to have a challenge and be with people like me. My experience was with Honors, so it was pretty challenging to get in. Some of the requirements were having a recommendation from a STEM teacher, writing an essay and taking a stem-based test. The test, in particular, was incredibly difficult because I hadn’t learned any of the topics covered in it, but since the courses in the camp were a lot easier, I assume the test was to see how good all the students were at choosing the best of them. There were around 20 something slots in the camp, but only 17 were filled because we were the best. Therefore, if you’re trying out for this camp, you probably need to be pretty smart since the competition is tough. This was the longest time I had ever been away from home, so I was pretty anxious before leaving, but I found that making friends and hanging out with them helped with the homesickness.
It was a 3-hour drive to College Station and when I got there, I got a tour of my villa and met the other kids in the game room. Our schedule for the 2 weeks was our lessons in the morning, some other activities afterwards and either pool or game night before going to sleep. Our regular lessons were statistics, air pollution and oceanography. In the second week, we swapped oceanography with finance. In air pollution, we talked about the rules of air with some experiments and tested the air pollution levels around campus (it was all safe). We also discussed cities with high levels of pollution and how it gets that way. In oceanography, we learnt about what the different branches of oceanography do, and marine life and we had some PhD students come in to talk to us about their jobs and fields. For example, one was a deep-sea miner who talked about the ethical impacts of human industry disturbing marine ecosystems and them being the first ones to do it, which I found very interesting. On that note, we got the chance to have panel sessions with university professors like the head of vet school, a civil engineer and an admissions counsellor. We were encouraged to look up their backgrounds before the session and think of insightful questions related to their backgrounds. In statistics, we learnt about how to work with sets of data to find correlations using an application called Jamovi and in finance, we set up a basic stock tracking sheet. Overall, my favourite lesson was air pollution because our teacher was really interesting and made the lessons fun, followed by oceanography, statistics and then finance. Looking back, I enjoyed oceanography a lot despite not being a field I'm interested in going into, because we did some fun experiments, like observing bioluminescence, and I learnt a lot about something I had no idea existed before this. All of the lessons were interesting, and I felt that I learnt a lot of new information from them, but I felt that we weren’t able to delve as deep into finance because it was only for the last few days.
After lessons, we had activities around A&M’s campus we could do such as visiting museums and libraries, like the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, taking tours of various buildings around campus and visiting A&M merchandise stores. Three standouts were the Zachry Engineering Building, the Electron Microscope Lab and the Wind Tunnel. The Zachry Engineering Building is where most of the engineering classes are held, and it was cool to tour. The whole place was state of the art, with 3D printers, monitors hidden in desks, lights that showed the power consumption of the building and colour-coded floors. A lot of the buildings in A&M are pretty cool, but this takes the cake for being so futuristic.
When we visited the Electron Microscope Lab, we met some of the scientists working there and found out what the equipment was being used for. I was surprised about just how many applications the microscopes were being used for, from studying butterflies to making iridescent clothing that can replace harmful dyes to learning the composition of rocks and minerals that people created. Finally, the most interesting place I visited in the whole camp, was the Wind Tunnel buildings. We got to walk inside a low-speed wind tunnel (low speed being up to 200 mph), learnt how wind tunnels work and saw some of the clients who had used the wind tunnels at Texas A&M, such as Boeing and NASA. We also saw a higher-speed wind tunnel and met some engineers working in hypersonics. This visit got me interested in hypersonics as a career and study option.
While we did a lot of educational stuff, we also had more fun activities. We got to go to a science convention and saw a physics show, where a scientist showed us how liquid nitrogen works, how solid oxygen is created, some other physics experiments and even made an explosion (100% safe). We also went to the Aggieland safari, a waterpark, and an arcade and watched Jurassic World Dominion. On the last day, we built rockets from kits and launched them, which was extremely fun and the best moment I had in the entire camp. Something I was surprised by was the amount of culture Texas A&M has as a university. Things like the 12th man, memorials to Aggies who passed away recently, Reveille and the yell chants made the campus feel more like a home and somewhere where you could bond with people easily. All of the camp counsellors and staff were very friendly and made everyone feel at home and comfortable. Unfortunately, the camp was cut short a day because someone caught covid before the camp and spread it when they arrived. Overall, I enjoyed this camp since it gave me a lot of insight into life as a Texas A&M student and probably made me a lot more independent and confident, after having to live away from home for so long. This camp isn't purely focused on teaching, so if you're going into this expecting to learn everything about statistics, for example, you'll probably be disappointed. Also, apart from lesson difficulty, I didn't notice much difference between Honors and Advancing camp students, so if you're disappointed that you missed out on Honors, just remember that you won't be missing out on much.
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