When Akshay Nair (pictured left) found out he had been accepted to a prestigious science camp this summer, he thought his days would be filled with elaborate laboratory experiments and lectures from world-renowned scientists and leaders in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, fields. 

“More than science camp, it felt like a life boot camp,” said the senior at Blue Valley West High School, Blue Valley Unified School District 229. “The life skills you learn, more than the content and the science, helped me the most.” 

Elise Davis (pictured right), a senior at Mill Valley High School, De Soto USD 232, said there was a significant degree of uncertainty for her and the other delegates attending the National Youth Science Camp as to what they were getting themselves into. 

“You’re getting flown out and being taken to the middle of the woods and they don’t tell you what you’re doing for three weeks, other than its STEM-related,” she said. “We didn’t know what it would look like.”  

The 61-year-old camp in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest hosts many of the most academically accomplished high school seniors and college freshmen in the country. Only two students from each state and the District of Columbia are chosen by their respective governor from applications that include essays and a letter of recommendation. 

While the National Youth Science Camp, or NYSCamp, does host notable industry leaders, and campers engage in a variety of high-level STEM activities, the camp purposely injects spontaneity in its three-week curriculum.  

“NYSCamp delegates are encouraged to live in the moment rather than constantly focusing on what comes next,” according to the NYSCamp website.  

“A lot of people were homesick at first and unsure what the camp would look like,” Davis said. “But the whole purpose of not giving us an agenda until the night before was a good thing. We got really close and became one big, new family. Many of us became friends within a day.” 

While he was able to participate in directed studies in math and physics and attend lectures, Nair said he also experienced “unexpected challenges” that he and his fellow delegates had to overcome.  

“Everyone was kind of uncomfortable for the first few days,” he said, echoing Davis’ sentiments. “We had to get out of our comfort zones. I feel like that’s useful for your career when unexpected things happen.”  

Davis said the first few days of the camp were spent touring Washington, D.C. When the delegates arrived at camp, they immediately didn’t have running water for almost the first week. 

“We had to figure out how to get drinking water and how to get water to the kitchen and keep ourselves clean,” she said, adding that the delegates constructed a dam in a nearby creek to pool the water to make it easier to collect. They also took turns hauling the water and doing other related jobs to get the water where it was needed. “We definitely had some creative solutions.”  

Nair said one of the challenges came when he and a group of campers had to go on a long hike, and they had to ration only a gallon of water for each of themselves. 

“We kind of had to deal with it,” he said. “We had to look for the solution.” 

Nair said learning to think on his feet will be particularly useful for the long-term career goal he has for working for a manned NASA mission to the moon or Mars, “whatever is happening at the time,” he said. Before that, though, he plans to major in aerospace engineering and minor in astrophysics. He doesn’t know yet which college he will attend but MIT, Stanford and California Tech are top of his list at the moment. 

Davis also is undecided on a college at this time but said she is looking at several good engineering schools with civil engineering an interest at the moment. Both she and Nair said the lecturers at NYSCamp opened their eyes to several of the STEM fields they might not have previously considered.  

“It really gave us a better idea of what we might be interested in in the future,” she said. “It was definitely worth the experience.”