In Our Words…

These are the adventures of the of the WPI Frontiers Enterprise. It’s a 2 week mission: to explore strange new programs, to seek out answers and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before….

Actually frontiers is a summer camp held at WPI every year specifically for rising juniors and seniors in high school and this year I worked as a Program Assistant (PA) which is somewhat like a residential advisor. It’s split into two sessions. In Session I, students will choose an academic program such as aerospace engineering, biology/biotechnology, mathematics, mechanical engineering, or physics just to name a few. Then to complement the academic program, each student will also enroll in a communication workshop, such as writing, art, music, speech, history, international studies, law, or theatre. Session II is dedicated solely to robotics and instead of a communication workshop the participants had management lectures. This year we had approximately 170 participants for session I and about 54 participants for session II. Students came from all over the World and the United States. Some of the international students came from as far as Greece, Georgia and South Korea and as close as Jamaica, Brazil and Canada.

Now we all know that ‘all work and not play makes jack a dull boy’ and as I program assistant my job is not only to make sure that the participants go back home to mum and dad safely, but to also to administer the fun. So we had capture the flag, dodge ball, movie night, board games and wiffle just to name a few.

Overall it was a fun but tiring. Many of my fellow PA’s and I held day jobs from 9 – 4pm and worked frontiers from about 6pm – 7:30am. We of of course slept but we had to wake everyone up by 7:30 for breakfast. Below are a couple pictures of PA shenanigans.

Overall I think all the participants as well as the PA’s had a good time and if you don’t believe me check out the two videos below. They pretty much summarize the last month of my summer at WPI .

Cheers!

WPI Frontiers 2011 Session 1 from Adam Epstein on Vimeo.

WPI Frontiers 2011 Session 2 from Adam Epstein on Vimeo.