Information
Even today, women remain underrepresented in STEM careers, especially in fields like physics, engineering, and mathematics. This program is a weekend day camp designed to present the wonders of physics to attendees and explore ways to overcome the challenges women may face in pursuit of these wonders!
The field of physics aims to mathematically represent the world in order to understand it and make predictions about how it may behave in the future. This approach can be used to study things as large as galaxies, weather patterns, or the global economy to things as small as cells, atoms, or fundamental particles. Over the weekend, attendees will learn all about these topics!
The camp will be held on July 19-20th 2025
Features of the program:
- engineering challenges that develop problem solving and teamwork skills
- hands-on labs that explain the fundamentals of various fields of physics, labs are led by current students at UCSD allowing attendees to connect with real scientists!
- Q&A panels with current bachelor’s and PhD students where attendees can learn what it’s like to be a scientist, how to become one, and what challenges women may face in the process of doing so
- talks from a professor on the research topics they explore in their own lab
In order to participate in this program, please submit an application (link below) with a statement of why you would like to attend and how you think this experience would benefit you. Applicants must be rising sophomore, junior, or senior high schoolers. This program is open to all high school students regardless of gender or any other protected status, but female students are strongly encouraged to apply.
Acceptances will be emailed by May 30th. Applications received after this date will be reviewed but space is limited and your acceptance is not guaranteed.
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Schedule of Events
Saturday
9:00 AM: Introductions
9:30 AM: Engineering Challenge
11-12 PM: Demonstration Sections
12-1 PM: Lunch
1-3 PM: Demonstration Sections
3-4 PM: Discussion/snack with Undergraduate and PhD students
Sunday
9:00 AM: Engineering Challenge
10:30-11:30 AM: Presentation from a Scientist
11:30-12:30 PM: Lunch
12:30-2:30 PM: Demonstration Sections
2:30-3:30 PM: Lab Tours
3:30-4 PM: Recap/snacks
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Planned Fields of Exploration
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Chaos/Non-linear Dynamics: Chaos theory studies how random or unpredictable behavior can arise from underlying patterns and deterministic laws in dynamic systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. To learn about this field of physics, attendees will conduct a Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction which can oscillate back and forth and form dramatic patterns due to the reactions sensitivity to perturbations in the chemical concentration.
Optics: Optics is the study of the behavior of light, understanding which is important to fields that use lasers or imaging. For example, building a quantum computer, designing telescopes, or creating plasmas. To learn about one application of this field, attendees will perform Young’s double slit experiment, which is a device that allows one to directly observe quantum mechanics in action.
Electronics: Designing circuits or building electronic systems is necessary for the entirety of the modern world to exist. To learn about this ever-pervasive field, attendees will build a small flashing circuit on a PCB that they get to take home! In this task they will learn how to solder and about what different circuit components do.
Rocketry: There’s whole wide universe around us and the way to get there is with rockets! Launching hundreds of tons of fuel, metal, and science off the earth is difficult and expensive, so scientist do everything they can to optimize their designs for efficiency and safety. To get a taste of how this is done, attendees will build their own bottle rocket, choosing their own modifications to optimize flight! These rockets will then be launched with a bike pump to use pressurized air as ‘fuel’.
Astronomy: We can’t get to most of the universe in the rockets we have today, so the entire field of astronomy studies what’s out there with information we can obtain here on earth (or nearby). Most of that information is in the form of light! To study this aspect of physics, attendees will build, test, and learn about use cases for a spectrometer, a device which scientists use to split light into constituent wavelengths for measurement. The devices will be tested on different noble gas plasma lamps and scattered white light from the sun.