CALS becoming more accessible to youth

CALS youth camp provides an opportunity to understand and experience the fields and majors in CALS to first-year high school students, and thereby helps them to understand the fields in the agricultural and life sciences and explore their career paths. By providing experiments and real experiences in each field of agricultural and life sciences (life science, environmental science), it promotes their interests in these fields and offers visualization. It also aims to help these students form positive attitudes towards career development and their studies through establishing mentor-mentee relationships with CALS students. It also creates a vision for the fields of CALS students (mentors) and promotes self-esteem.

Why CALS camp is different

 While other colleges focus on the experience of their majors, CALS emphasizes mentoring activities. The ratio of CALS students to high school students is set at 1:5 for mentoring. CALS students operate and support the program and unit activities as mentors, and graduate students of the Department of Agricultural and Vocational Education organize and manage the program and oversee safety as supervisors. After the activities, time for reflection is provided through a CALS reflection and post-activity presentation, which makes the CALS camp distinct from other camps.

What the participants say about CALS camp

More than 200 applicants applied for the camp, and the satisfaction score was on average a 4.66 on a 5.00 scale, showing that most students were satisfied with the program. The students showed a high level of satisfaction with experiments, training, and mentor-mentee activities. In particular, the mentor-mentee activities showed a high average satisfaction score of 4.8, indicating that the objective of the mentor-mentee activity program (developed and operated by the student administration), which is to promote close relationships between camp participants, offer experiments and training related to the fields of agricultural and life science, and promote CALS reflection based on special seminars, was met at a certain level. The participating students were able to participate in experiments and training that could not be experienced in school and receive answers from the mentors for their questions regarding college life and studies. In addition, students were able to learn and establish new, valuable perspectives on the agricultural and life sciences, which altogether influenced the students positively.

CALS camp for the future

 Given opportunities, CALS camp will be held more often, and a new attempt to separate the camps for environmental science and life science can also be made. We are also exploring the option of extending the duration of the camp based on student feedback. Most importantly, however, we hope that this camp can improve people’s views of agricultural and life science.

Student Reporter Na, Hye-ji / Kim, Su-yeon