For nearly three decades, Skip Rochefort has been running a weeklong summer camp at OSU to give underserved high school students a chance to see what it’s like to be a college student in engineering.
“In engineering, the problems we solve can be big and they can have an impact on a lot of people. That’s what I like to tell the kids,” said Rochefort, an associate professor of chemical, biological and environmental engineering.
The Summer Experience in Science and Engineering is an on-campus residential camp where students spend a week in the dorms. Over the years, Rochefort has partnered with colleagues throughout the College of Engineering so that SESEY campers can be placed with undergraduate and graduate student mentors in faculty labs and work with them on short-term research projects. At the end of camp, the high schoolers give presentations about the research they’ve done.
The camp was established in 1997 to offer opportunities for students who have historically been underrepresented in engineering fields. It now primarily serves girls, as women make up just 16% of the U.S. engineering workforce and 23% of undergraduates receiving engineering degrees.
In 26 years of operations (the camp skipped a couple of years due to COVID-19), SESEY has brought 1,194 high school students to OSU, 76% of them girls. Between 40 and 50 students come to campus each year from all over the country and the world, including South Korea, Germany, Panama, Nigeria and Ghana.
From the beginning, Rochefort was intent on giving high schoolers real lab time, rather than sticking them in a classroom for a week doing group design challenges.
Lab projects this year included plastics-to-fuel chemical engineering in Rochefort’s lab, work on clean drinking water in environmental engineering, nanoplastics in cells in biological engineering, solid fuel ignition and flame spread in mechanical engineering and many others. Eighteen faculty members, plus Rochefort, and nearly 40 undergrad and grad students volunteered to serve as research mentors for the week.
The poster session in Kelley Engineering Center at the conclusion of SESEY 2025.
Campers pay just $250, which includes meals and lodging, and scholarships are available to any student who needs one. The actual cost per person is $750, but SESEY has been able to keep fees low thanks to occasional grant funding and OSU faculty donating their lab and student time.
Rochefort hires engineering students as live-in counselors to monitor the dorms, and most of them also sign on as lab mentors. Conversations between engineering students and high school campers are another invaluable resource for kids considering a career in engineering, Rochefort said.
“Here’s the big thing: Everybody thinks, of course, that engineers are nerds and that they have no fun in college, that they have no friends and they don’t shower,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to get them here to see that the engineers they work with are real people who also have fun, who play sports, who do shower.”
And while engineering requires learning math and physics, that doesn’t mean everyone got into the field because they love math and physics, Rochefort said.
“There’s a place for everybody based on what you like. You just need to do what you’re passionate about,” he said. “Everybody’s different. We all have different passions which contribute to the whole.”
Elain Fu, professor and director of OSU’s bioengineering graduate program, has been a faculty mentor for nine of the past 12 SESEY sessions, bringing students into her work developing sensors for diagnostic and monitoring purposes in health care. This year, campers got to design, 3D-print and characterize microneedle arrays.
Fu’s daughter has also been a SESEY camper, and it was her experience that showed Fu how much the camp teaches kids outside of the lab.
“What resonated with my daughter the most was the experience of meeting other girls who are super excited about college and have a passion for STEM, and then bonding with them over non-STEM things,” Fu said. “My daughter had already experienced being in the stark minority in some of her elective STEM classes, so the environment in the SESEY program was a welcome reversal of that for her, and I think it was empowering.”
Two-time camper Mikayla Chaffins, 17, had a similar experience at camp. She enjoyed it so much that she’s now doing an internship in Rochefort’s lab this summer while still in high school, working on his project to develop wildfire-resistant roofing materials using low-cost polymer materials. (“It’s really fun because we get to set things on fire,” she said.)
“Doing SESEY showed me that I’m not alone in this journey, and there are other people like me, from all over Oregon and all over the world,” Chaffins said. “I know I want to be an engineer, but I’m not sure what specific part of engineering I want to pursue yet, so going to SESEY has let me be exposed to lots of different kinds.”
Chaffins actually first heard of Rochefort’s work when he came to her elementary school several years ago and demonstrated the same projects that she ended up working on in SESEY and her internship.
“If I could do SESEY again, I would,” she said. “But I have to go to college now.”
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