Sycamore Summer Scholars

Description: What exactly is the law, and how does it affect me? In this course, we will investigate how your rights and liberties impact your everyday lives, what the day-to-day life of a lawyer is like, and how to have meaningful and constructive debate over important issues. We will visit the Vigo County Courthouse and sit in on a real, live session of Court proceedings, and then have a mock trial in our beautiful Magna Carta Room (yes, Mom and Dad, you are invited!) This course is not restricted to just those who want to be a lawyer, but anyone who is interested about how the law impacts our daily lives.

Field trip: Vigo County Courthouse

Student packing list: They should bring one day of business casual and one day of something closer to business professional, although there is no need for them to go buy something new. 

Description: What is a drug?  Many of us have a vague understanding of this, but not much more.  How do drugs work? Where do they come from? What are the benefits and risks of drugs to people and society? How are drugs developed and marketed?  What are the differences between legal and illegal drugs?  These questions and more will be answered during this ISU Summer Honors course.  In the morning seminar, we will discuss natural and man-made drugs, their chemistry, and how they work in people.  We will learn about a wide range of drugs, including pain killers, antibiotics, and drugs acting on the brain to relieve depression and anxiety or to help us think more clearly.  We will learn about prescription and over-the-counter drugs.   As preparation for the above, a foundation of chemical principles will be provided through discussions and presentations focusing on analytical techniques.  In the midday laboratory, we will conduct experiments that isolate or synthesize a number of compounds discussed in the seminar, as well as analyze their composition.  As part of the laboratory, we will also have a campus field collection trip to collect local plants and extract chemical compounds from them. Please note:   Students enrolling must have completed a high school chemistry course.

Student packing list: Students must wear closed toe shoes and will need a calculator and laptop or computer access for writing an essay and preparing a PowerPoint presentation.  A lab coat and safety glasses will be provided.  Students should bring their smartphones to class.  We will use them for looking things up and taking Kahoot quizzes.

Description: This course will introduce students to the laboratory skills that can lead to careers utilizing genomics, genetics, microbiology, and molecular biology through a combination of learning activities and hands-on medical and biomedical laboratory work. 

Student packing list: Students will be provided personal protective equipment for use in the laboratory. Apparel for laboratory classroom requires no shorts and no open toed shoes. 

Description: This course provides a bridge between academic learning and real-world challenges by partnering with automobile companies and the City of Terre Haute's Sustainable Cities Program. Students will understand customer demand for the electric vehicle (EV) charging station, procurement costs, financial performance, the application of sustainable energy, and transportation routes. Design optimization solutions are presented through analysis techniques in business and supply chain management. 

Field trip: Terre Haute City Hall.

Description: Students will learn about key elements to make communities more resilient, as well as elements of preparedness for, response to, and recovery from disasters. Students will then apply this knowledge in a role-playing simulation where they will be asked to lead a community through a disaster. 

Student packing list: Students should provide pens and a notebook.

Description: Experimental archaeology is one of the most important tools to develop and test models which link human behaviors and natural forces to the archaeological record. It can involve the study of ancient technologies (like making stone tools or smelting copper), replication of subsistence (like butchery) and other practices, and identification of site formation processes (like trampling by animals). In addition to the rigor of a college level course, this seminar provides a hands-on experiential learning experience as students learn how to recreate past technologies. During the week students will be introduced to the fundamentals of experimental archaeology and experimental design. To provide a fully authentic experience, students will participate in research activities for one or more ongoing experimental archaeology projects learning about how tools were made and used in the past. 

Student packing list: Close toed shoes, durable pants; optional - work gloves, eye protection.

Description: This philosophy course uses Season 1 of The Good Place as a serialized philosophical text to explore what it means to be a good person, how moral systems function, and whether moral growth is possible. Students watch each episode (approximately 20 minutes), followed by a short philosophical reading and structured discussion. Each episode is paired with a specific philosopher while centering one moral question. Class participation will be encouraged through individual thought experiments, in-class debates, collaborative projects, creative exercises, role play, etc. 

The Good Place teaches philosophy by turning abstract moral questions into lived, relatable experiences, while using humor to make those ideas accessible rather than intimidating. (One of the characters—Chidi—is a Philosophy professor and teaches some of the philosophers we will learn about in this course!) Instead of presenting ethics as a set of rigid rules or dense theories, the show embeds philosophical concepts—like moral responsibility, intention versus consequence, and the possibility of moral growth—directly into the characters’ struggles and choices. Humor plays a crucial role in this process: jokes, absurd situations, and self-aware commentary lower viewers’ defenses and invite them to engage with difficult ideas. By making us laugh at moral failures, contradictions, and overthinking, The Good Place shows that philosophy is not just an academic exercise but a practical, human endeavor. In doing so, this extremely popular series demonstrates that thoughtful reflection about being good can coexist with joy, humility, and curiosity, making philosophy feel both meaningful and approachable.

A description of each episode of Season 1 of The Good Place can be found here: https://thegoodplace.fandom.com/wiki/Season_1

Student packing list: Notebook or journal.

Description: The “overview effect” is a concept coined by the philosopher Frank White in 1987 to describe the experience many astronauts feel as they look back at planet Earth from space. Astronauts who have been to orbit often describe how seeing our home world from this entirely new perspective fundamentally alters their relationship to Earth, its living systems, and our own species. The experience begins with a profound sense of awe and wonder at the raw beauty of our living world—the only planet in the entire universe where we know that life exists. The “overview effect” then leads to an ever-deeper appreciation of the fundamental interconnectedness of all life on Earth, the extraordinary fragility of our living world, a recognition that humanity is a part of this living system and not separate from it, and finally a powerful sense of responsibility that prompts a corresponding need to care for our environment. 

This interdisciplinary seminar brings together the arts and the sciences in a unique and powerful way by introducing students to the concept of the ““overview effect”,” employing classroom-based individual and group activities to facilitate students’ holistic understanding of the idea and then taking students out of the classroom and into both Nature and the local human community to prompt creative responses to the worlds around us. The students will then organize, as a culminating project, their own demonstration of how they have been individually and collectively affected by the effort to bring the “overview effect” down to earth. Students will be guided in the practice of closely reading both literary and scientific texts published by a wide variety of poets, fiction writers, filmmakers, photographers, journalists, and scientists. The seminar will give students the opportunity to practice writing about their creative and evidence-based readings and then sharing their work with the class daily in reflection review sessions. The culminating student-organized project will be a public showcase of their creative and thoughtful responses to course content and course questions. 

This seminar will study the “overview effect” but most importantly we will explore ways of bringing this sense of awe and wonder, connection and curiosity, down to earth for our use here and now. We will examine poetry, fiction, journalism, photography, film, science writing, and published scientific research to better understand the “overview effect” and our contemporary world defined by anthropogenic (human-caused) climate and ecological crises. We will be guided by the work of writers, artists, scientists, and thinkers such as Emily Dickinson, John Clare, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Amanda Gorman (all poets), Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers, and Samantha Harvey (novelists), David Attenborough and Joel Sartore (filmmakers and photographers), Carl Sagan, Neil de Grasse Tyson, E. O. Wilson, Suzanne Simard, Peter Wohlleben, Lars Chittka, Michael Mann, and Katherine Hayhoe (scientists), and Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, and David Wallace Wells (science communicators and journalists). Above all, students be presented with opportunities in and out of the classroom (including at the ISU Community Garden and the local not-for-profit reTHink, which focuses on community-wide sustainability education) to reconnect with the living world around us and to celebrate that world through students’ own creative expression. The seminar will conclude with a student-organized multi-media showcase where students will present their own creative work, be it poetry, storytelling, art, photography, film, or music.

Field Trip: reTHink headquarters.

Student packing list: A spiral notebook for notes and reflection journal entries, pens, pencils, work clothes and shoes that can get dirty, laptop if available.