What Is it Like Taking a Pre-College Course at UVA?
Even though applications have closed for this year, we can’t wait to welcome the next Inspire cohort in 2027. If you’ve been thinking about applying next year, we’ve asked our current students and staff what their favorite parts of the Inspire Summer program are and why you should apply. Keep reading to hear from our Digital Marketing faculty, Forensic science students, and more!
Q: What was your favorite part about this course?
“My favorite part of this program is being able to work with the brands I love and am passionate about, like Lululemon. I was able to create many ads, social media posts, and even landing pages for them. Using a brand that I’m passionate about helps me learn and it’s more enjoyable.” – Digital Marketing Student
“My favorite part of the forensic science program has been the activities Ms. Genalo, the forensic science teacher, designed for us because she’s given us a lot of activities to help collaborate with each other and we just have a lot of fun. For example, today we did the blood lab where we demonstrated blood splatter. Yesterday and the day before, we did crime scene investigation which I really enjoyed.” – Forensic Science Student
“My favorite part about this program has been being able to do the sheep brain dissection yesterday. It was really cool being able to cut off certain parts and seeing how the inside of a sheep brain looks compared to something like a human brain. It’s definitely an experience you can’t really get in school and things like that so it was a really unique and awesome opportunity for me.” – Neuroscience Student
“My favorite part of this class was the people I met!” – Teamwork and Leadership in Engineering Student
Q: What has been your favorite part about teaching in the Inspire program?
“It’s definitely the students and their passion and the enthusiasm they bring to wanting to learn new things. Also, the fearlessness and courage they exhibit when they’re confronted with new challenges that they’ve never experienced before.” – Biomedical Engineering Faculty
“My favorite part of teaching in the Inspire program is the excitement from the kids as they learn new things, and it all starts to come together. I love watching them learn each of the pieces: a little bit about social media and a little bit about email, and a little bit about websites. Then they can put it together into a full strategy so the whole comprehensive thing comes together. It’s super exciting to watch, and it makes it feel like they could go and do this job in the real world, because they’ve learned so much in such a short amount of time.” – Digital Marketing Faculty
“Teaching in the Inspire program is a new challenge for me after 18 years of teaching at the college level. What’s really amazing is to have this group of younger students come in with so much curiosity and so much talent and be able to drive right in on business topics that oftentimes are reserved for college students.” – McIntire Business Institute Faculty
Q: What do you hope students will take away from this experience?
“Mostly I want the students to understand what an amazing gift they are to the world and how their ideas, passion, and creativity can really create new solutions that can actually help people. They have so much potential and they care so deeply, and I want them to see that all of that can really change the world.” – Biomedical Engineering Faculty
“I hope that the takeaway from this experience is that marketing is something that involves a lot of data, a lot of analytics, and creativity. It’s really fun for me because I get to use both sides of my brain. We’ve talked a lot about how if you work for a bigger agency or maybe even a bigger branch, you may not have your hands in all the sides of marketing, but if you work with a small brand or a smaller agency, you have to wear a lot of hats. You’re developing the strategy, you’re doing the creative, you’re doing the analytics, and it gets to exercise a lot of different ways to think. Because AI is so prevalent in learning right now, we’ve also learned that you can’t just turn it over to AI. It is not just the solution. It is a tool that they can use to help enhance what their capabilities are. It’s a great way to look at the data, really understand what your competitors are doing in the market, and AI helps facilitate that research a lot faster and give us a more comprehensive data set. However, we have to think about how we’re going to use it and what that means for the campaigns. We’ve been able to use both sides of the brain, we’ve been able to use AI, but not let AI take over what we’re doing, and I think that’s been important.” – Digital Marketing Faculty
Q: What is something you learned this week that you did not know before?
“Something that I learned was the different areas of engineering, specifically biomedical engineering. I’ve always been interested in engineering but I didn’t know that was a possibility until this camp. After the speaker, David, gave his presentation about his research, I got really interested in that and it made me want to take more classes that align with that major I want to do in the future.” – Teamwork and Leadership in Engineering Student
“I learned the basics of coding on NetLogo and I also learned a lot about the biological mechanics of cancer which was really interesting to me because I have yet to take AP Biology, so this was kind of a pre-AP Bio course which I thought was very interesting. Learning how to integrate biology and chemistry into the engineering process, which I always thought would be very confusing, was also cool and I think the professors did a great job explaining the engineering process in steps we do throughout the program.” – Biomedical Engineering Student
“This class has definitely increased my perspective on building a brand and business and starting a company in general, along with how to grow it and expand it both financially and socially.” – McIntire Business Institute Student
