New offerings and a healthy dose of competition left campers happily humming along.
When the 2024 BioE Buzz camp was declared a success, the organizers used the momentum to level up in 2025. Its inaugural year boasted one week of experiments, tours, lectures, and activities for 16 high school juniors and seniors. This past summer, however, introduced a new element that lit the fire for bioengineering-curious kids: competition. Expanded to two one-week sessions for 32 students, the camp’s codirectors Khadija Zaidi-Rashid and Liszt Yeltsin Madruga randomly assigned them into teams.
“We would do lab tours, meet faculty experts, and have seminars in the mornings,” said Zaidi-Rashid, an assistant professor in bioengineering. “After lunch, we would separate them into their groups, where they would develop a certain skill and work on a team challenge.”
One day, the kids used 3D printing to model a bone that couldn’t break. The next, they mixed polymers to see which could suspend a steel ball. Another day saw them swabbing campus benches, rocks, and trashcans to find out which would result in the petri dish with the richest bacteria culture.
“They were very creative in working with our parameters,” said Madruga, a research assistant professor in bioengineering. “We told them they could not swab anything biological, like humans. They pushed this by swabbing a bench they saw animals climbing on, or the bottom of a person’s shoe.”
All of the projects were tested live on the final day of camp in front of the campers and parents, where the winners were announced. The prize? A one-week internship in the students’ department of choice.
According to Zaidi-Rashid, both the competition and the prize were huge hits with campers. “At the beginning of the week, we took them to the EDGE ropes course to encourage team development. They were immediately psyched about the competition, asking if they could get points for finishing the course,” she said.
The camp’s hands-on aspect was also motivating. One camper returned for a second year at the urging of his parents. “At first, he wasn’t excited," said Yeltsin Madruga. “He was afraid it would be a repeat from last year. At the end, he came up and told me, ‘I thought it would be an adult’s idea of educational…like lectures.’ He was happy to be wrong!”
And the fact that the reward could help them in their careers and get aspiring bioengineers to take a deeper look at George Mason was a win for campers and the college alike. “Many of the campers arrived on the first day wearing college t-shirts and sweatshirts—and none of them were from Mason,” said Zaidi-Rashid. “On the last day, they were all wearing Mason apparel, and lots of them were interested in our programs because they saw what we could actually offer.”
The most rewarding, however, was helping the kids build community. “On the first day, the students were very quiet. By the end of the camp, they were all very friendly and chatty,” she said. “In high school, it’s hard to know who has your same future aspirations, so it was nice to see them find their people.”