Summer Programs

Two people at a table working together to plant a seedling.

Community-Engaged Learning

The Office of Community-Engaged Learning and Vassar Education Collaboration have greatly strengthened the College’s relationship with the surrounding area.

Student and professor seated facing the camera with a playground in the background.

Vassar’s Ford Scholars Embrace a Summer of Critical Thinking

Every summer since 1988, Vassar students have been collaborating with faculty members in the humanities and social sciences on research projects under the auspices of the Ford Scholars Program. A typical project supports one faculty member and one student to engage in rigorous scholarship, teaching preparation, or course development.

Groups of people standing in front of project posters on the wall while people listen.

Students Recount ‘Empowering’ Research Experience at URSI Symposium

The Undergraduate Research Summer Institute’s 2023 Symposium showcased the 55 science projects undertaken this summer by 89 students and 33 faculty mentors.

Student standing in front of a poster explaining it while gesticulating to a group of people off camera

URSI Symposium 2022

Students, faculty, and administrators who took part in the 2022 Undergraduate Research Summer Institute (URSI) celebrated their research projects at URSI’s annual Symposium.

John Murphy, the Loeb’s curator of prints and drawings, and Ford Scholar Carissa Kolcun pose with 11033, an artist’s book that chronicles the story of Mary Morst, who gave birth to twins while she was incarcerated in a Virginia prison in 1913.

Student Becomes Art Curator as a Ford Scholar

Ford Scholar Carissa Kolcun’s keen interest in the works of art created at the Women’s Studio Workshop will be on display this fall at an exhibition they curated in the Loeb’s Spotlight Gallery.

Vassar Grand Challenges Co-Director Tom Pacio (center) leads a discussion with student and faculty at Elevating the Student Voice, a three-day symposium that explored ways to making STEM curricula more inclusive. At left: Professor of Biology Jodi Schwarz, former Grand Challenges Faculty Director. At right: Associate professor of Biology Jose Perillán, current Faculty Director.

Students Rise to the Grand Challenge of Equalizing STEM Education

Thirty-two students from Vassar, Mercy College, Wheaton College and the University of Massachusetts gathered on the Vassar campus last month to trade ideas on how to make STEM curricula more inclusive.

Ford Scholar Probes Effect of Immigration Law on Immigrant Families

What was the social and economic impact of a 2008 immigration law that led to numerous deportations? A Ford Scholar and Associate Professor of Economics Sarah Pearlman spent the summer looking for answers.

Garrett Goodrich ’22 (left) and Alison Carranza ’23 prepare plant specimens catalogued by naturalists at Mohonk Mountain Preserve for digitization, enabling scientists anywhere in the world to study them.

URSI Student Researchers Help Expand Access to Important Botanical Data

Professor of Biology Mark Schlessman and two of his students spent part of the summer at local herbaria, helping to ensure that scientists from all over the world can study plant species that have been growing in the region for the past 150 years.

Summer Immersions Program: Getting a Jump-Start on College

Fourteen first-year students got a jump on their college careers this summer as members of the Summer Immersion in the Liberal Arts program sponsored by Vassar’s Engaged Pluralism Initiative (EPI). The young men and women, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college, spent four weeks on campus taking specially designed, credit-bearing courses, learning about resources the college offers, and taking part in service-based learning in the Poughkeepsie area.