It’s the Da Vinci Engineering Enrichment Program Summer Academy but everyone calls it DEEP – and for the 10th straight year, it’s welcoming ambitious high school students from across Canada and around the world to U of T.
Running for four weeks in July, the camp offers teens the chance to go deeper into their high school curriculum – giving them the opportunity to learn fundamental math and science skills typically mastered by first- and second-year university students.
The past decade has seen the Academy undergo tremendous transformation.
“We’ve gone from being just a day program where we saw a couple hundred students to being a residence program where we’re seeing over a thousand students from around the world,” said Dawn Britton, Associate Director of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering’s Outreach Office.
The Academy’s sessions, targeting everything from design to enzyme digestion to fluorescent imaging, are designed and led by U of T Engineering students. Graduate students take areas of their research and pare the subject down to foundational skills that help prepare students for future studies, while undergraduate students gain invaluable experience as camp counsellors who assist the running of the courses.
“We have really incredible instructors, phenomenal students,” said Britton.
Esther Lau, a co-instructor on a course on stem cells, obtained her MASc from IBBME in Biomedical Engineering and is now in her second year of medical school. She has seen DEEP’s impact on students ripple out over the years.
“The first year they started running the program I remember being a student of DEEP, and what I was able to get out of it. As a grad student I’m able to come full circle and be in a teaching role.”
It’s an opportunity worth leaving home for – even if it means travelling across the world.
“It takes 12 hours to get from Korea to here,” said Chae Kyung Lim, a grade 11 student who made that journey to be a part of the DEEP experience. “But I love the very high level [of teaching].”
The hands-on laboratory experience and cool equipment is a major draw for many of the camp’s participants, as well. Getting to manipulate the state-of-the-art microscopes is exciting, as are exercises such as how to change the “food” for cell cultures inside a massive bio-safety cabinet that continuously circulates air in the newly renovated, top-of-the-line IBBME undergraduate teaching lab.
