Stones and Bones Summer
Have you always been interested in dinosaurs? Or did you take a biology class or earth science class that sparked your interest in evolutionary biology? The University of Chicago runs an intensive four-week summer program that splits time between the Field Museum in Chicago and an onsite archaeological excavation in Wyoming. It looks like a pretty intense experience, including rough camping during the Wyoming portion of the program. But for the right teen this could nurture an existing interest or launch a study or even career path!
Join the Field Museum’s Distinguished Service Curator Lance Grande for a four-week intensive practicum in paleontology in Chicago and Wyoming. Go into the field and behind the scenes at the Field Museum to learn how fossils are collected, analyzed, and conserved, as you work alongside museum scientists in the lab and in the field. In Chicago, Dr. Grande and other Field Museum scientists will take you into the labs and galleries where they work and study as they introduce you to important concepts in geology, paleontological methods, stratigraphy, and earth history. You will also learn about basic techniques for the study of evolutionary biology including comparative skeletal anatomy of fishes and other freshwater animals. You will examine methodological concepts such as fossil preparation, illustration, and description. In this way, you will acquire the fundamental scientific background needed to discover and understand the significance of fossils in the field. In Wyoming, experience what life in the field is all about when you join the ongoing Field Museum expedition in the Green River Formation. This site is one of the world's most productive fossil sites and contains an entire 52 million-year-old community of extinct organisms. Previous expeditions to the Green River Formation have led Grande and his team to uncover thousands of fossils, including plants, insects, mammals, crocodiles, birds, lizards, turtles, and fishes, many of which are currently on display at the museum. Spend your mornings and late afternoon digging for fossils from the Cenozoic Period and interpret them in a way that allows you to incorporate fossils into studies of living animals and plants. In the early afternoon and evenings, you can go into town for provisions, help prepare meals for your fellow diggers, and sit around the campfire with the museum's researchers and their families. When you return to Chicago, you will conserve, catalog, and analyze your new discoveries in the museum's preparation labs, using the same techniques and equipment that the museum's own staff uses.
See below for more information about summer programs in general.
How do I get started? Go to their website and apply.
How do I expand this narrative arc? Paleontology is a very niche interest for a teen, but if authentic it is a very interesting brand. Consider how you can expand and deepen this interest through independent study, travel or citizen science offerings (like the one at our Space Archaeologist post). If you’re lucky enough to live in an area of archaeological interest you should consider extending your summer learnings and experiences into the school year.
HOT TIP: This is a very unique and incredible opportunity for a student who is fascinated with ancient history, earth science and paleontology. It’s an interesting choice, and one that would undoubtedly spark conversation around the admissions table.
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT SUMMER PROGRAMS: College admissions officers are very adept at identifying “resume padders”: expensive, one-off programs paid for by your parents which do not mesh with your narrative arc. Therefore, make sure any summer program or course you consider falls into one (or more) of these four buckets:
Highly selective/competitive
Totally unique + linked to your narrative arc
Evidence of adulthood (long hours, multi-year commitment or simply hard work)
A jumping off point or expansion for an authentic narrative arc.
If none of the above apply, a program could still have value to you if it allows you to test a potential interest. However, if it does not end up being a jumping off point for further interests, then you may not want to mention it in your high school resume