Upper School Intersession 2025

If you are interested in healthcare and/or dermatology, this is the workshop for you! The Interactive Technology for Skin: Community Outreach, Research, and Education (iTS-CORE) workshop is an exciting, hands-on experience where you’ll come visit the Stanford campus to get an inside look into healthcare and dermatology. This is a unique opportunity to explore your curiosity through different stations that cover everything from career journeys to cool skin science. Here’s what’s in store:

1. Healthcare Career Panel: Meet medical students, nurses, and physicians who will share their journeys in healthcare — hear about the multiple paths or career changes to medicine/healthcare and how everyone has a unique and inspiring story!

2. Skin Health Basics: Discover the science of your skin! You’ll learn how melanin plays a role in skin health, what causes acne (and how to manage it), and why sun protection is important for everyone.

3. Hands-On Dermatology: Step into a dermatologist's shoes by practicing with the tools they use everyday – look at your skin with a dermatoscope, practice punch biopsies, and dive into our augmented/virtual reality dermatology game to learn about skin cancer and smart sun habits.
4. Optional Lab Tour: Pending time, we will take a tour of an active Stanford lab working on bacteriophages.

There is no prerequisite skills or knowledge needed to participate in this experience.

This session is OFF CAMPUS and hosted at Stanford. Transportation will be provided by Nueva.

Neuroscience is a relatively young field in biomedical research, but it has revolutionized our understanding of how humans and other organisms perceive and interact with the world. Additionally, neuroscience research has elucidated some of the mysteries of brain disease that have long since eluded the medical field. In this intersession course, students will take a survey of the world of neuroscience, with a focus on how the brain perceives and interacts with its environment.

The session will be divided into two parts: 1) a lecture-based survey of neuroscience that tracks the anatomy and physiology of how the brain processes visual stimuli and then plans and executes movements. The session will use the simple example of hitting a baseball to highlight the complex visual and motor computations that that the brain performs in less than a few tenths of a second. 2) The second half of the lesson will be a practical experiment where students will measure their own visual-motor reaction times and to use that data to estimate the speed at which information is processed in their brains and whether we can experimentally modulate information processing.

This lab will teach you the basics of surgery and how to suture a wound. Get the opportunity to learn valuable medical skills related to surgical professions. This class will also guide you through the steps nurses, doctors, and surgeons follow to clean, disinfect and anesthetize wounds prior to surgery and suturing.

How does the brain influence the way that we perceive the world? My research seeks to understand this question! Come by for a crash course on some basic neuroscience and fun experiments to get a taste of what it means to be a human with a brain and sensing organs.

No previous skills required! If you're interested in psychology, biology or human feeling/sensing/experience, this is definitely the place for you. I might ask for some participants in some experiments, if you’re willing!

This lab will teach you the basics of surgery and how to suture a wound. Get the opportunity to learn valuable medical skills related to surgical professions. This class will also guide you through the steps nurses, doctors, and surgeons follow to clean, disinfect and anesthetize wounds prior to surgery and suturing.

How does the brain influence the way that we perceive the world? My research seeks to understand this question! Come by for a crash course on some basic neuroscience and fun experiments to get a taste of what it means to be a human with a brain and sensing organs.

No previous skills required! If you're interested in psychology, biology or human feeling/sensing/experience, this is definitely the place for you. I might ask for some participants in some experiments, if you’re willing!