Duluth Superior Magazine / June 2011 / Summer at the Colleges

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Summer at the Colleges

Obviously, the period from September to May is the busiest period of any school’s year, when parking spaces and a free computer in the lab are hard to come by. But summers — which used to mostly be the dominion of rolling tumbleweeds mixed in with a few students here and there – are becoming more and more bustling at our local colleges. There are classes being added, activities and trips being planned, and the doors of the institutions are being opened to the community at large in new ways.

“Summer at UW-Superior definitely has a different pace and feel than the fall and spring semesters, but it’s still busy,” says Al Miller, Senior University Relations Specialist with the school.

He explains that UWS’s Summer College brings many current students and community members to campus for academic courses, and students attending other universities can take courses and transfer the credits to their institution.

“Some of our students work with faculty on research projects throughout the summer,” he says. “Other students spend part of the summer on campus preparing student orientation and housing programs for fall. We also have several hundred young people from the community on campus attending a variety of recreation, athletic, arts and academic camps.”

This long list of activities is similar to the ones that the other local universities are also proud to reel off. It definitely seems that the idea of a typical “school year” is one that is less concrete than it used to be.

“Academically and culturally at the College of St. Scholastica, it’s like night and day in the summertime compared to five years ago,” says Robert Ashenmacher, St. Scholastica’s Executive Director of Communications. “We have much, much more happening now than in years past.”

Ashenmacher says that, in the summer, St. Scholastica caters to students who want to complete their degrees “in a timely fashion,” and the school has beefed up their online component in part to meet these demands. “All told, we serve about 1800 students every summer. It just goes to show that we’re really, really active.”

Like UW-Super, Scholastica also offers a lot of other activities— have international trips to Mexico, Peru, and China, theater for children, robotics camp, a national cheerleading camp, conferences for theologians. “That gives you a sense of the vibrance we have going on here,” he notes.

Over at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, the story is largely the same – less students, but plenty of activity. “It starts with May term,” says Cheryl Reitan, Interim Director of Public Relations and Marketing at the school. During that time, many students take trips that are intended to reinforce whatever learning they do during the course of the regular school year. Reitan is herself took a trip with Study Abroad students to Sweden during this period.

And, like the other area colleges, there is plenty of curriculum at UMD out there for the more ravenous knowledge-hunters. “Just about every major offers at least one course during the summer,” Reitan says. She says the campus in the summer is definitely “not a ghost town,” which may have been more the case ten or twenty years ago.

No matter what your age or interest, there is likely something happening at one of the Twin Ports’ universities this summer that will appeal to you, and you don’t even have to be a student. Peruse the schools’ websites (or give them an old-fashioned phone call) and see for yourself right now the worlds of activities that summer life in a so-called “college town” can provide.