Senioritis? Not With These ITA Seniors.

Almost half way through the class of 2011's last year at ITA, the seniors are showing no signs of lack of motivation, procrastination, drop in lab performance, or "coasting" through the afternoon. These symptoms more commonly known as senioritis fail to be observed at ITA with this year's excellent students. The students have already shared their proposals for their project at the Holiday Luncheon. For those of you who could not attend, here is a brief re-cap of what the seniors are doing.

Protein Tubar Video by Thor and Thuy Dan

Thor and Thuy Dan are working with Professor Dave Nelson from the department of biochemistry here on campus. They taped an instructional video of Professor Nelson using the Tubar Protein Modeling Kit for SMART teams at Madison West High School. SMART Teams stand for Students Modeling A Research Topic, an extra-curricular activity that introduces high school students to the field of biomolecular research. This video will be used for teachers in the program as a demo of how to use Tubar Kits.

Flash Animations by Eddie and Jeremy

Eddie and Jeremy are creating complex Flash Animations for Professor Sebastian Bednarek of the department of biochemistry. From the pictures on the side you can see their drawing progress thus far. Eddie is working on cell membrane trafficking (on the left) and Jeremy is working on clathrin mediated endocytosis (on the right).

Scientific Demos by Noah and Maya

Noah and Maya are taping scientific demos for the biochemistry course "Exploring the Biomolecular World" taught by Professors Dave Nelson and Michael Patrick. The two scientific demos that Noah and Maya will be filming is a short video on the hydrophobic effect and an experiemnt using Beta-Galactoside.

ITA Recap by Adrianne, Lakoye, and Jasmine

Adrianne, Lakoye, and Jasmine will be using iMovie to create short video presentations about past ITA projects. These projects will be displayed for recruitment and funding meetings to demonstrate the great work done at ITA.

Video Tape of the Crystallography Research Facility

Students will be working with one of the post graduate students working with Professor Katrina Forest. Professor Forest uses x-ray crystallography in her research to study the interactions between humans and microbes. our students' task will be to record a 45 minute video of the entire process.

Interviews of Campus Professors

Students will be venturing to different research laboratories on campus to interview professors about their work. The video's goal will be to inform undergraduate students about the various research on campus to help aid them in choosing which lab to join. The first professor the students will be interviewing is Douglas Weibel from the Department of Biochemistry.

Tutorial on Jmol by Leija and Ivan

Ivan and Leija will be using CamStudio to help record a tutorial of how to use Jmol, a protein modeling software program. They will be recording an expert in Jmol give an instructional lesson of how to use the program and then distribute this video to various science professors on campus.

Holiday Greeting Cards by Ashanti and Julie

Ashanti and Julie are using Adobe Photoshop to create custom-made greeting cards for the UW-Madison Children's Hospital. They will be printing out their designs and hand delivering them in the upcoming months.

ITA Digital Yearbook by Eileen and Kiran

Eileen and Kiran will be creating the second ITA digital yearbook. The yearbook will include fun facts about each ITA student and highlight the events from this past year. Currently, the two are in the process of taking the ITA student yearbook pictures and designing a new layout in Adobe InDesign.

Congratulations Seniors!!! Keep up the great work!

Glimpse into College (Virtually): Techy Perks

ITA, as a college preparatory program, offers opportunity after opportunity for students to gain skills that will allow them to succeed in the college environment. Often, though, it is still difficult to get a picture of what being a college student would actually be like. So, for our first choice weekend, I (Elizabeth) designed a session entitled Techy College Kid Perks. The class was meant to give students a new view of college student life from the lens of what resources will be available to them when they begin their journey as college freshmen!

We had a nice sized intimate group with 5 students - two of whom were dressed for the occasion! (Marylin Monroe and the Queen of Hearts - this was the ITA weekend right before Halloween) Sitting around a table together, we began to go through the many resources available to UW Madison students. There was a lot of interest! Students surfed on NAXOS, an online music library that we have free access to through the university at the Mills Music Library Website. To make it interesting, one student in particular would type in random syllables and see what music came up! We had some fun selections - from African drums, to Asian strings. Continuing with music, everyone seemed very interested in the music school calendar; they did not know before that the university has so many cool free concerts going on all the time! There is also the option of listening to some of them online.

The next resource that elicited a lot of excitement was the university timetable. It is the complete listing of all classes happening in a given semester, including location and time. The students were very excited to discover they could actually take a tour and go to college courses before they had graduated from high school! I encouraged them to do so!

Speaking of classes, we also talked about how to find and register for classes. Long gone are the days of my mother's college experience, in which she had to run across campus to different departments to register for classes - now everything is completely done online. This is, however, always a very confusing process for new students at a university; hopefully now this group will feel more confident when it comes their turn! The campus map also came in very handy as I shared with them some of my favorite study spots around campus and described where certain buildings are.

Our end of class project was that each student should choose a library on campus - there are almost 50 of them - to research. In our class, we got to look at the Special Collections library within Memorial Library, the Social Science Library, the Geography Library, the Primate Research Center, and the Chemistry Library. Each student prepared a little presentation in PowerPoint on the library they had chosen. It was enjoyable to hear about each library and especially why each student chose that library. Here are some images from Natalie's presentation:

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by how interested the students were in learning more about college and preparing themselves well now. And the students left feeling better equipped for the college experience and well informed about ways they can utilize college technology resources now, even while still in high school! And, the resources covered here are only a tiny slice of what's out there!