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Summer Immersion 2022 will be held online Wednesday, July 6th – Friday, July 22nd and is free of charge. The majority of sessions take place from Monday-Friday 9am-5pm (Eastern Time) with some sessions in the evenings. Participants will be able to build their own schedule which will include multiple sessions in each of the categories below. Click here to view a sample schedule of what your participation might look like.
The Liberal Arts Curriculum: Academic Offerings
Virtual mini-courses offer a first glimpse of what is possible through Vassar’s academic curriculum. Students will be expected to register for at least 2 virtual mini-courses, though we encourage you to elect to enroll in even more. Each mini-course includes two 1 hour and 15 minute sessions. These sessions are ungraded and may include some reading and writing assignments.
- Virtual Mini-Courses, including classes such as:
- Communities are Critical
- Examining Unexamined Lives
- Experiences of Illness
- Exploring the Centrality of Race in American Politics
- Global Inequalities
- Grappling with Scientific Uncertainty
- Learning Before & After George Floyd & Breonna Taylor: Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark
- Music is the Message: Communication with Sound
- Reading Like a Writer//Writing Like a Reader
- Slow Listening: Introduction to Oral History
- Solving Protein Structures Through X-ray Crystallography
- Using Intergroup Dialogue as a Tool to do Anti-Racist Work
- We Live in an RNA World
- What Explains the Gender Pay Gap?
- What it means to Grow: The Life of Malcolm X
Experiential Learning sessions allow students to learn about faculty members’ research interests and offer an opportunity to students to imagine themselves as researchers too. As an added bonus, students will meet current Vassar students who are engaging with faculty’s research areas.
- Experiential Learning; Introductions to Research in the Lab, Field, and Community in fields such as:
- Asian/American Studies
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Cognitive Science
- Computer Science
- Physics
- Political Science
- Psychological Science
- Sociology
The Hidden Curriculum: Support Network & Resources
Through sessions that connect students to various administrators and offices on campus, students will uncover the unspoken knowledge that will be critical to their life as a student both inside and outside the classroom. Students will attend Q&A sessions with current students & administrators to grapple with the questions they have and those they may not know to ask. Summer Immersion participants will be expected to attend at least 3 of these sessions.
Making Connections & Building Community
Summer Immersion students are placed in small cohort groups of their peers. Each cohort group is led by a Summer Immersion student intern who is a current Vassar student. These cohort groups allow students to get to know each other, do fun things together, and begin to build Vassar friendships and support systems. Summer Immersion participants will engage without their cohorts throughout their time in the program.
Class of 2026: Regardless of your comfort level across these areas, you are coming to Vassar equipped with your own personal gifts, histories, and experiences that will serve you well on this new journey. Take the Dive with Summer Immersion and you will have the opportunity to challenge yourself to grow while remembering to hold onto the skills and gifts that have brought you this far.
