Rutgers Future Scholars use Legos at the Art Library to learn about teamwork and libraries. Photo credit: Megan Lotts.
The Rutgers Future Scholars program places rising High School juniors in an internship for one week during the summer. This summer, the New Brunswick Libraries hosted two internships. Ryan Womack hosted 5 students and worked with them on Big Data, and Jill Nathanson hosted 5 students working on gamification.
For those unfamiliar with the Rutgers Future Scholars Program, here is the description from its website:
The goal of the Rutgers Future Scholars program is to increase the numbers of academically ambitious high school graduates who come from less-advantaged communities, inspire and prepare them meet the standards to be admitted to colleges and universities, and then provide tuition funding to those who are admitted and choose to attend Rutgers University.
In addition to working on their respective projects, the interns were provided an overview of the Libraries and had an opportunity to meet a variety of faculty and staff. Snack breaks were hosted each day by librarians, access services staff, and the communications team. The interns also traveled to the Art Library one day to participate in using Legos to learn about teamwork and libraries.
The students working with Jill Nathanson created an event for transfer students. The challenge was to create an event that reinforced the library instruction transfer students received in their library sessions while also making it fun and giving them an opportunity to interact with other transfer students. The students worked together to create a team based activity that will be used this fall at the Alexander Library.
The students working with Ryan Womack explored data science with R, working through exercises on data wrangling, data analysis, and data visualization using the R open source statistical software environment. By working with real-world College Scorecard data, the students gained understanding of the challenges and possibilities of working with live, raw data sources.
