NCSSM-Online on campus again after 18 months!
Dec. 2021
Walking along Hill Street, with paper helicopters falling from the Watts building and classes meeting on the senior benches and our pentagonal gazebo, and then entering into classrooms filled with engaged students meeting their instructors in person for the first time, sunlight streaming through windows on two gorgeous fall days, after so long not being able to have our NCSSM-Online community together, there was one song refrain, from Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” that seemed so very appropriate:
I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright (bright)
Bright (bright) sunshiny day
Unprecedented numbers of students came to NCSSM’s Durham campus for our Fall 2021 online weekends – over 300 combined for the Oct. 2 and Oct. 30 weekends! The days started with icebreakers in the gym to introduce students to each other and for students to meet the faculty before leaving for their classes. Lunch and enrichment sessions – finances, nuclear energy, origami, flying, electronic music, and more – provided another opportunity for students to get to know each other before finishing their academic program that afternoon.
There are many thanks to go around – to our families, students, and teachers; to the event organizers and those feeding and looking after our students and getting the campus ready for the weekend – and especially to those who made sure it was a safe weekend for everyone by creating and implementing testing protocols.
So what was this bright sunshiny day like? Check out some of this fall's Online Weekend course activities below!
We look forward to the spring online weekends and more bright, bright, sunshiny moments together, regardless of the weather!
Students in Dr. Erin Quinlan’s Honors Climate Change Biology class visited Duke Forest to study carbon sequestration.
Photo credit: Dr. Erin Quinlan
Students in Dr. Shannon Namboodri’s Environmental Engineering class spent time at Indian Trail Park to take stream profile measurements.
Photo credit: Laiken Edwards
Cheryl Gann & Philip Benge led their AP Calculus BC students on a “math trail” to discover how math shows up in the world around us.
In Mr. Taylor Gibson’s Foundations of Data Science class, students used paper copters to learn about data collection and analysis to discover factors related to fall time.
Shweta Shah and Anushka Kulkarni shared this group picture from the class.
Inside the music played on, with Jason Lineberger’s Honors Media Studies class!
And Dr. Ashton Powell’s Introduction to Neuroscience class, which enjoyed the light coming into NCSSM’s biology lab while preparing for their activity.