This summer, the Stanford Summer Session program has been taking students – visiting, graduate and commuting – throughout Northern California to explore and experience the area and its unique culture.

The program is led by summer housing directors Jason Gosch and Alexia Thompson. Although it is both of their first times leading these trips, this is the program’s third summer offering trip destinations to students.

Gosch and Thompson send out weekly emails informing the 1,500 students on campus of the upcoming trips. Trips have included attending the L.A. Galaxy vs. San Jose Earthquakes soccer game and Minor League Baseball games, as well as going to Santa Cruz Beach and the California Academy of Sciences. The destinations were selected before the summer based on popularity and feedback from past summers.

All trips are free and paid for by housing fees. Interested participants just have to sign up and submit a deposit to claim their spot, which ensures that everyone gets a chance to experience the trips.

“Just to make it fair for everyone, if you have already been on the trip and there [are] others who haven’t, you go onto a wait list,” Thompson said.

Although the sizes of trips range from 20 to 120 participants, according to Gosch, sign-ups almost always fill up within the first 10 minutes of being opened, and students are always excited to go.

“Seeing how enthused other students are about the trips makes us happy,” Thompson said.

However, trips are not just fun for the students, but also for the house directors as well.

“I’m a Florida native, so any of these trips are exciting because they’re all new to me,” Gosch said. “And so when I go on trips with other students from around the country or around the world, it’s just as exciting to them! It’s like ‘Cool, we’re being tourists together at Stanford!’”

Gosch and Thompson recommend all students sign up for a trip if they want to get a unique experience during the summer.

“We would definitely want people coming from other parts of the country and the world to experience Northern California as much as possible,” Thompson said. “We really want [the trips] to show them as much as possible with so little time but still be able to do their work and get that Stanford experience, whatever it means to them.”

 

Contact Lisa Hao at lisa ‘dot’ hao13 ‘at’ gmail ‘dot’ com.