This vision-focused curriculum is giving high school students a college experience.While many middle schoolers and high schoolers have chosen to spend their summers by the pool, the young scholars have been hard at work at Utica College.

For three weeks in July these young students get a little taste of college.

“They are taught by PhD’s on different topics and early on they get to feel out what they’d like to research more in depth,”  said Young Scholars executive director Pam Matt. This is their fourth annual steam program- STEAM being the acronym for science, technology, engineering, arts and math. Groups of students researched topics like muscle memory, color blindness, photo manipulation and the list goes on.

Several Utica college professors have been working with the students in physics, computer science photography and biology… Dr.Mroczek has been working along other professors teaching students about eye anatomy and eye diseases..

We’ve done eye dissections, comparison of different eye models and also the brain, each of the professors in the program we’ve been kind of centered around the theme of vision, photography um perspectives, lenses. “Mroczek says they’re concluding the program with students applying what they’ve learned by putting together a presentation and later being judged.

Young scholar, Tabo Bo and his group researched optical illusions. “We discovered just how easy our eyes can be deceived and even when we know that something is true or false our eyes still deceive it as something else.” Other students focused on the medical side of things like Alexia Bo who researched Amblyopia, otherwise known as lazy eye.

“It’s actually the leading cause of vision loss in small children so we thought it was important to look into it and see like possible treatments on how to cure it.”

Many students say this program is a great influence into their future careers.