Outreach program brings high school students to university

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 19:00:00 -0500

One of the most successful components of our program is the Outreach initiative, composed of several yearly opportunities for students to both build their skills in network building, leadership, and communicating to an audience unfamiliar with language research. These are all skills central for successful interdisciplinarity. This year students expanded the high school outreach program to two schools, inviting 100 high-schoolers from the AP Psychology class of the Paint Branch High School to attend a talk and several lab demonstration at the University of Maryland. All the lab demonstrations were organized and run by students in our program, providing them with experience in explaining their research to a non academic audience. There were around 15 topics covered ranging from Language and Culture, to Animal Communication, Sign Language and Sounds and Brains.