Lerner is among thousands of teens participating in Brown’s 11 summer Pre-College Programs, designed to give high schoolers from across the globe a sampling of academic and collegiate life. While each Pre-College Program is distinct, they are all engineered to prepare students for their eventual college experience, wherever they end up studying, said Dean of the Division of Pre-College and Undergraduate Programs Adrienne Marcus.

“Students actually get the experience of what it’s like to be on a liberal arts and research campus and be among so many different students engaged in a wide variety of activities,” Marcus said. “There’s no way they can meet everyone on campus, but they all know they’re taking classes and that they’re in this together.”

Over the course of six weeks this summer, 6,000 students are studying with Brown, according to Marcus. Nearly 5,100 students are living on campus or at several locations both in the U.S. and abroad. Just over 900 students are participating in online offerings, some of whom are taking multiple classes, contributing to a total of 6,500 summer course enrollments.

Summer@Brown, the largest Pre-College offering, features more than 250 one- to six-week courses that reflect a wide range of topics and offer young students the opportunity to live on College Hill — or join remotely from anywhere around the world — and embrace new perspectives on how to work, learn and live.

“We want students to have the experience of a Brown education, wherever they are,” Marcus said.

While most students who participate in Pre-College Programs are enrolled in Summer@Brown, Pre-College programming is as diverse as the fields Brown undergraduates choose to study.

The Brown Environmental Leadership Lab combines concepts in environmental studies, ecology and leadership, with programs this year taking place in Alaska, the Eastern Sierras in Mammoth Lake, California, and in Rhode Island. Brown Experiential Education programs offer rigorous academic and cultural immersion experiences for high schoolers in Italy, Spain and England.

The Leadership Institute prioritizes collaborative problem-solving combined with leadership skill development in areas such as social entrepreneurship, racial justice, law and social movements, and gender equity. The STEM for Rising 9th and 10th Graders program encourages students to advance their knowledge of STEM disciplines, and the Pre-Baccalaureate program offers new high school graduates the opportunity to earn college credit during Brown’s Summer Session.

Students in 2024 Pre-College Programs come from 48 states, as well as Washington, D.C., Guam, and Puerto Rico. With the exception of Antarctica, students from every continent are enrolled, representing 81 different countries, from Azerbaijan to Australia.

Local students are integral to the Pre-College community, as well. This year, close to 170 students from the Providence Public School District are enrolled — a jump of more than 20%, or roughly 30 more students than last year, marking the highest number of PPSD attendees in the program’s history.

“Having a mix of local and international students is really meaningful for everybody on campus,” Marcus said. “It means that the diversity of experiences and the diversity of perspectives is that much broader, and that feeds everybody and helps everybody learn more about themselves, about the world and about each other.”

Learning through experiments, leading through experience

On a warm July day, students in “Product Design for a Healthier Planet: Intro to Circular Economy Thinking” — a course offered in Pre-College’s STEM for Rising Ninth and 10th Graders program — gathered inside the Brown Design Workshop.

Surrounded by piles of disassembled headphones, keyboards and other consumer goods, working amid the din of power saws and laser cutters, the students brainstormed how to improve the products’ design, guided by the workshop’s director, Associate Professor of the Practice of Engineering Louise Manfredi.

Over two weeks, students in Manfredi’s course are working in pairs to dismantle popular products, examine their manufacturing processes and redesign them, all part of a dynamic introduction to fundamental engineering and circular economic design principles.

“I think it’s really important to show that there are many different flavors of engineering,” Manfredi said. “Engineering isn’t just for a few people — really, it’s for everybody.”

For Vancouver, Canada, native Serina Fan, who will enter high school in the fall, the course has bolstered her interest in product design while introducing her to new tools, like 3D printing.

“We are really learning through experimentation,” Fan said as she sat among a pile of speaker components. “We really want to find out how we can make better products.”

Experiential learning is a crucial aspect of the course. When students encounter a hiccup and work through it, it’s emblematic of the determination and creativity that successful engineering requires, according to Manfredi.

“Often, students become their own biggest teachers,” Manfredi said.

But that sense of discovery and development isn’t reserved just for Pre-College participants.

In addition to Brown faculty, over 270 instructional staff are graduate students, and over 60 undergraduate students from Brown serve as teaching assistants. Marcus said that shifting to teaching — rather than studying — during the summer can be illuminating.

“Teaching provides you the opportunity to understand your own subject matter in a precise and simple way, because you have to explain it to people who don’t share your expertise,” Marcus said. “It’s a very different way of approaching scholarship.”

That’s certainly the case for Jai Chavis, a fourth-year medical student at the Warren Alpert Medical School, who co-instructs “Hands-On Medicine: A Week in the Life of a Medical Student.” 

When he was in high school, he attended a similar pre-college course that inspired him to pursue medical school. He was accepted to Brown as a student in the Program in Liberal Medical Education and soon discovered a passion for working as a teaching assistant, especially with younger students enrolled in Pre-College Programs.

“This experience has reaffirmed that I love teaching,” Chavis said. “There’s this wonder in their eyes. Everything is new, and they’re still trying to figure out what it is that they like, what they want to do… and there’s just so much joy in that.”

Students can tell when teachers are passionate about their subject matter.

“They try to push you forward — not hold you back,” said Lerner, the rising high school junior from Puerto Rico. “You don’t just learn biology, you learn how to get there.”

Nadia Fobbs, a fellow Pre-College classmate from Detroit, echoed that sentiment, adding that having the course about medical education taught by medical students lends important context and nuance to the lessons.

“Our instructors have been giving us such good career advice,” Fobbs said. “You learn about their actual experience and not just their medical knowledge.”

College life beyond the classroom

There’s more to college than coursework, and Brown’s Pre-College Programs entrust students with the responsibility of making sure they’re set to succeed in other important areas of collegiate life.

Many students get a taste of the self-sufficiency required to succeed in college, including navigating campus, figuring out how to do laundry, ensuring they get to the dining halls in time to eat a nutritious meal, attending faculty office hours, and discovering the myriad cultural and community resources available to them.

“It’s a tremendous amount of expectation that we put on students,” Marcus said. “Those are not skills that can be mastered in a couple of weeks, but it is a kind of muscle that we want students to start flexing, so that when they do arrive at their institution of higher education, they are better prepared to be successful and thrive. ”

It’s a level of freedom that some may not be used to. But for many in the programs, the shared experience presents a new opportunity to bond with fellow students.

Fan said the social programming available, from movie nights to rock-climbing outings, has made the foray into studying in the U.S. easier than she anticipated.

“I like the activities we get to do,” Fan said. “They’ve really helped me not be homesick.”

In addition to accountability and motivation, Marcus said a key learning opportunity is understanding what it means to be a good citizen on campus and live among new people.

“It means learning how to be responsible for your own actions, how to be caring in your own actions, and how that benefits you, other people and the whole community,” Marcus said. “Those are experiences that they might not have necessarily ever managed.”

For Fan, the new experience hasn’t just made her a better student — it’s made her a more informed and confident person.

“Pre-College has pushed me to communicate with people better,” Fan said. “They may have different ideologies to mine, and this has exposed me to that. It has definitely prepared me to live abroad and be independent.”