Advanced Research & Practicum Night Showcases Students as Scholars, Artists, and Storytellers

On Monday, December 8, the hallways at Greenhills felt less like a school corridor and more like a small conference center. Families, classmates, and mentors wove their way from poster to poster as 43 students stood ready to explain everything from cell signaling pathways to equine veterinary care to the making of a musical documentary.

It was Advanced Research & Practicum Night—already a beloved Greenhills tradition, but with a new twist. For nearly two decades, the Advanced Research Program has given students the chance to spend the summer between their junior and senior years working full time in research labs across the region. This year, for the first time, that model expanded to include the humanities and arts through a new Advanced Practicum option.

Julie Smith, who has led Advanced Research for 14 years, has watched the program evolve from a smaller extracurricular experience into a full-credit, highly selective course that asks a great deal of students—and gives just as much back. One of the keys, she says, is that every student is treated as a genuine contributor, not just an observer.

“We talk to the hosts before they agree to take a student, and we ask them to commit to giving each student their own little tiny sliver of the pie,” Smith explains. “There has to be some element of the project that they can take ownership of, and I think that really makes a difference.”

Students spend roughly two months of their summer embedded in labs, working alongside postdocs, graduate students, and principal investigators. That immersion, Smith says, changes how they see themselves and their futures.

“They become a part of the lab,” she says. “They’re working alongside other researchers and having those conversations about what university is like, and then having really rich conversations about the science. Because they’re rising seniors, they bring in the advanced classes they’ve taken at Greenhills, and they’re mature enough to make those connections. That’s what sets it apart.”

Just as important as the research itself is learning how to communicate it clearly, confidently, and to different kinds of audiences. That’s where her longtime collaborator Caroline Huntoon comes in.

“We’ve made it so much more about how you communicate your research, as far as the class portion is concerned,” Smith says. “Bringing Caroline on—oh my gosh, the difference that has made!”

In the Advanced Research classroom, students lead journal clubs, deliver full-length research talks, and practice elevator pitches, all while giving one another feedback. “They know more about their stuff than anybody else in the building,” Smith says with clear delight. That expertise often spills into their other classes; she recalls a moment in AP Biology when a student realized the topic at hand mirrored her summer project. “I said, ‘Tell the class,’ and she turned around and explained her work and how it tied into what we were talking about. You don’t get that without these students having this experience.”

The new Advanced Practicum program is built on the same foundation as Advanced Research—serious work, sustained over time, and shared with others—but opens that experience up to students whose passions don’t live in a wet lab.

“Practicum basically extends Advanced Research into the humanities,” Huntoon explains. “Advanced Research has students working with a mentor in a lab full time for eight weeks, and the humanities just don’t work that way.”

Instead, Practicum invites students to design ambitious, mentor-supported projects in fields where there is no lab to walk into: writing a novel, studying murals with local artists, exploring equine veterinary medicine, or creating a musical documentary.

“The connection to mentors is there, but it isn’t quite as regular,” Huntoon says. “I also think it allows students to find a project they’re really passionate about and dive into it. With Practicum, if you know what you want to do, you can really do it.”

Though the two programs are distinguished by their subject areas, the caliber of work and presentation skills required of students is still closely aligned, and it was on full display during Advanced Research and Practicum Night on December 8. Practicum posters were intentionally interwoven with Research posters, so visitors encountered scientific research and humanities projects side by side.

“We didn’t know how it was going to work,” Huntoon admits. “Research has such a clear model, and poster sessions already exist. I just said, ‘You’re going to make posters; I don’t know what they’ll look like, but let’s figure it out together.’ They really dove in, did a great job, and were very quick to come up with their speaking points.”

Six students participated in the first Advanced Practicum cohort. As pioneers of an all-new program, they didn’t have past examples to reference. Instead, they were challenged to become the model and help define the program, and they each rose to the occasion.

“Every project was really meaningful, really thoughtful,” Huntoon says. “It was a great range of topics. It’s going to be hard to live up to them because they were just really on top of it and really good. But we’ve got a good base, and we’ll keep moving.”

For Smith, this year’s Advanced Research & Practicum Night felt like the culmination of years of careful growth. The class is more rigorous, the application process more intentional, and students arrive with a clearer sense of what they’re stepping into. But, she says, the heart of the evening hasn’t changed. “This group of kids did some fantastic stuff,” she says. “They were really responsible, they took ownership of their work, and they were proud of what they’d done and wanted to communicate it.”

As families drifted out into the December night, that pride—and the sense of what’s possible when young people are trusted with real work—lingered. Whether they spent the summer pipetting in a lab or drafting chapters of a novel, Greenhills students stood in the hallway as scholars, artists, and storytellers, ready to teach the rest of us what they’d learned.