About 140 high school students dove into unique experiences and areas of study across the University of Nebraska–Lincoln through Big Red Summer Academic Camps, held June 8-13.
The camps, led by university faculty and support staff and organized by Nebraska Extension 4-H youth development faculty, are a chance for students to explore academic interests and future careers with classes, field trips, and hands-on experimental and design work, alongside traditional nightly camp activities, such as crafts, recreation and s’mores.
The camps are one of the ways Nebraska 4-H reaches one in three state youths each year and are open to any high school student, regardless of past or current affiliation with 4-H. Focus areas for the 10 camps offered in 2025 were engineering; robots and drones; animation; digital media; Esports; fashion and apparel; state government; meteorology and climatology; geoscience; and the umbrella of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
“[The students] are extremely curious,” said Irina Filina, a geophysicist and associate professor in Earth and atmospheric sciences. Filina led the Discover Geosciences camp, with a dozen campers.
“We did a field trip at Robber’s Cave,” she said. “Before we went, I did a little bit of lecturing on what types of rocks they should pay attention to, and they came back so excited they saw it.”
Filina said she scheduled sessions around topics her campers expressed interest in, including exploring gravity fields and hearing from a climatologist and a physicist.
“I wanted to accommodate their curiosity and provide them with different perspectives, because these are our future majors, our future scientists,” she said.
Greg Fritz, a Nebraska Extension professor in 4-H youth development who served as director of the camps this year, said the program couldn’t exist without the incredible faculty who lead the classes and field trips. They are also supported by current university students as camp counselors, including many who were once campers themselves. The students stay in Massengale Hall and eat in the campus dining centers. Through the various camp activities, they see a lot of what the university offers while also getting a chance to consider their futures, coinciding with the national 4-H initiative, Beyond Ready.
“We are all about having them be beyond ready for whatever lies ahead, being the next leaders, being the next decision makers, being prepared for whatever it is in life,” said Kathleen Lodl, associate dean for Nebraska Extension. “These camps allow students, when they’re deciding what’s next, to explore an area and figure out if it’s something they’d like to do as a college student and as a career.
“Additionally, about 90% of our campers do go on to higher education, and many come here because they’ve spent a week with our professors, on our campuses, in our residence halls.”
Jeff Beavers, director of recruitment and outreach for the College of Engineering, headed the Discover Engineering camp, and said he aimed to make it the ultimate campus visit experience while also exposing the students to the breadth of career fields under the umbrella of engineering.
“They’re in our classrooms, with our faculty, doing activities, getting into our lab spaces,” Beavers said. “A lot of occupations might be more visible, and people may not know how much engineering goes into just about anything behind the scenes. The goal at the end of the week is that students have been exposed to many types of engineering, and they have an idea of what they might do with an engineering degree.
“It's a very, very broad world, and there's so many different fields you can go into.”
While most campers were from Nebraska, campers also came from other states, including Kansas, Arkansas, Colorado and California. Billy Sheehan, a rising high school senior from Danville, California, found Big Red Summer Academic Camps through a web search, and couldn’t find anything like it anywhere else.
“I’ve never been to Nebraska before — no family connections,” he said. “But I’ve been looking for opportunities to get exposure to engineering fields, and this was a really unique opportunity. I looked into the program and we’re covering all the topics I’m interested in.”
Nebraska was already on Sheehan’s radar as a Big Ten school, but his camp participation solidified his plans to apply for admission.
“I love the campus, and all the really talented, smart people I’ve been able to interact with,” he said. “I’m also impressed with the college, and the programs and equipment they have for students to run with their own projects.
“It’s piqued my interest in some new things. I don’t think I realized before how many types of engineering there are, so it’s really given me more exposure to all the fields within engineering.”
Haley Roeser, a rising senior from Grand Island, Nebraska, said she enjoyed learning about the different facets within engineering and finding new interests in topics she’d never heard of before, like chemical engineering.
But, above all, she was thankful to have a campus experience before starting college.
“It’s giving me an opportunity to clarify my interests, and I’ve gotten to see what college life is like, meeting new people, living in the dorms,” Roeser said.
