By Clare Ulrich "That course taught me a lot about life," says Leilani Jackson, a high school junior who attends Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem and lives in Long Island City. She’s talking about Mary DePalma’s Introduction to Psychology, which she took at Ithaca College last year in the College’s summer program for high school sophomores. "I really didn’t know what psychology was until I went there. We learned so much. I still have the book and look in it because it helps me understand people." Nathan Wendlowsky of Spencer, New York, thought Elaine Leeder’s Introduction to Sociology was great. "We got so much more involved in different subjects than we ever would have in high school. We talked about racism, prisons, women as minorities. I learned a lot about others and more about myself — how I act toward others and how I feel about myself." Amanda Muise, from Shady, New York, was impressed with Marian MacCurdy’s nonjudgmental approach to the Personal Narrative course she teaches. "She revered the process of writing and passed this enthusiasm on to us. By the end of the two weeks, we had shared things about our lives that we may not have told our closest friends back home, and Dr. MacCurdy provided a trust-inspiring environment conducive to this." Jackson, Wendlowsky, and Muise are 3 of the 90 high school students who attended the residential summer college program at Ithaca last year. Jackson and Muise enrolled in the two-week program for sophomores; Wendlowsky, who had completed the sophomore program the previous summer, returned for the newly created five-week program for juniors. All earned college credit for the courses they took, which they selected from 12 of the courses offered to Ithaca students during the summer. Sophomores choose one course and earn two college credits; juniors choose two, usually three credits each. Ithaca’s summer college instructors are the same faculty who are in the classroom during the academic year. That’s not necessarily true of programs at other institutions, says program director Warren Schlesinger, who teaches accounting. In addition, he says, "The Ithaca College program is designed to be small enough so that students can form close bonds with each other and with their instructors. Class size is normally limited to 12 students, and sometimes fewer. What we hear from our students at the end of each summer is that the quality of the teaching and the friendships developed with other students make the program a transforming experience."
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