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The world-famous landscapes of East Africa, including Serengeti National Park, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Rift Valley lakes of Tanzania form the backdrop for this special course on protected area conservation, its impacts on local people, and alternative models that simultaneously promote conservation while creating local community benefits. We take full advantage of the special format of Sophomore College, spending an initial week on campus with lectures and lively discussions on these topics, before flying together on a 12-day expedition to northern Tanzania to witness firsthand the challenges of parks and peoples in this classic setting. Summer reading is designed to help us all prepare for the experience. Students will also undertake research on a related subject of interest to them by drawing on the literature to develop and present a final paper to the class, providing a closer look at key places and issues we'll consider. Joining us for the travel segment of the class, and a few days on campus, will be a group of Stanford alumni who have an interest in these same topics. The course will explore the pros and cons of parks and protected areas as they affect both wildlife and human inhabitants, and to address the dilemma of how to achieve conservation in a manner that creates benefits for local people and promotes social justice. We will look at the history of specific protected areas to ask: What approach to protected area (PA) conservation has been taken in each case? Who are the key proponents and what are their main social and ecological objectives? How successful has the protected area been at achieving its conservation goals? In what ways is climate change affecting that success? What are the benefits of the PA to people and who receives them? What are the costs of the PA to people and who pays them? Where benefits are not commensurate to costs, what, if anything, is being done to address the imbalance? How well is it working? Are there alternative conservation models that would make the interests of parks and people more compatible, and reduce the tradeoffs between them? What is needed to make these alternative models work? The travel portion of the class will help us take an on-the-ground look at these questions. We are scheduled to visit Tarangire, Lake Manyara, Mt. Meru, and Serengeti National Parks, plus the Maramboi Wildlife Management Area, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and nearby Maasai villages. Please note that students are required to read four books over the summer, to reflect on them in two short essays (2-3 pages each), one due in July and the other in August, and to come to campus in the fall well-prepared to discuss each reading and co-lead a class discussion on at least one of them. A 6- to 8-page final paper will be based on literature research on an approved topic, focused on Tanzania or nearby. Students will be expected to present main findings of that paper during an evening seminar as we travel.

Are you on an engineering pathway and trying to decide if opportunities in healthcare might be of interest to you? Or, are you committed to a career in medicine and eager to explore how to incorporate technology innovation into your plans? In either case, Needs Finding in Healthcare is the Sophomore College for you! Several courses offered during the regular academic year provide students with the opportunity to understand healthcare problems and invent new technologies to address them. However, this is the only one that gives undergraduates the chance to directly observe the delivery of healthcare in the real world and identify important unmet needs for themselves. Needs Finding in Healthcare is a Sophomore College course offered by Stanford Biodesign. We're looking for students who are passionate about innovation and interested in how technology can be applied to help make healthcare better for patients everywhere. Over approximately three weeks, you'll spend time: Learning the fundamentals of the need-driven biodesign innovation process for health technology innovation; Practicing how to conduct observations and shadow care providers to identify compelling unmet health-related needs, and then performing observations in Stanford's emergency department, operating rooms, and clinics; Conducting background research and interacting with physicians and patients to understand and prioritize needs you have been identified; Brainstorming and building early-stage prototypes to enhance your understanding of the unmet need and critical requirements for solving it; In addition, you'll meet experienced innovators from the health technology field and explore different career pathways in this dynamic space. Join us if you want to make a difference at the intersection of medicine and engineering!

There is growing interest in the intersection of art and science, whether from artists adapting technology to suit their visions or from scientists and engineers seeking to explain various visual effects. To take advantage of possible creative sparks at the art/science interface, it is necessary for fuzzies and techies to have some knowledge of the language used by the other side. This interface will be explored through examining approaches used by an artist and an engineer in the context of the materials science of cultural objects. In-class lectures, hands-on studio practice, and field trips will be used to illustrate these different perspectives. At the heart of the scientific approach is the notion that a cultural object, e.g., a painting, is a physical entity comprising materials with different physical properties and different responses to environmental stresses presented by light, heat, and water. In support of this outlook, in-class lectures and discussions will focus on the basic concepts of color, optics, mechanics, composite structures, and response of the object to environmental stress, and we will visit Bay Area museums to see how artists employ such techniques. The hands-on studio experience is designed to increase students' confidence and develop their appreciation of differences in materials. It is not necessary to have any artistic training, only a willingness to experiment. The in-class studio projects will include working with line and shadow; color, binders, and mordants; global sources of pigments; substrates and writing; and material failure. Students will make one technical presentation on a topic in one of the five areas relevant to a painting: color, optics, mechanics, composites, and stress response. In addition, they will prepare one essay on the issues surrounding the intersection of art and science. Finally, they will complete a project related to one of the thematic areas covered in the hands-on studio sessions and make a final oral presentation describing their project.

What is happiness? Might writing your own (mock) obituary help you find happiness? What else can you do to be happy? What has happiness to do with the good life? Does happiness define the meaning and purpose of life for people everywhere? In this course, we combine reading, discussion, group activity, and fieldtrip to figure out, collectively over the course of 2.5 weeks, what happiness is all about. We consider what philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, writers, and artists have to say about happiness and reflect on its relationship to wealth, wisdom, health, love, pleasure, justice, community, spirituality, and mortality. We give equal weight to Chinese and Western sources and interrogate deeply held assumptions through the lens of cross-cultural inquiry. During the summer, students read a novel and a popular treatise. In September, we review these texts and place them alongside scholarly works, movies, short fiction, and social commentary as we interrogate the chimera of happiness. In addition, we will experiment with meditation, short-form life writing (including mock obituaries!), and service-learning. We meet daily for lectures and seminar discussion. Students submit three short reflective papers and three online commentaries, and in small groups make an oral presentation and do a creative exercise.

If you counted the many modern guises in which ancient Greece and Rome show up in our lives, how many could you find? You might consider, for example, words we speak, films we watch, buildings we use, political concepts we debate, styles we admire, myths we read. This course is our chance to explore such rich diversity, emphasizing the more material kinds of `classical remembrance. Our focus will be on California, its architecture, its collections of ancient objects. Readings, to be discussed in class, will inform our treasure hunt, which will start with Stanford University collections and proceed farther afield. Pandemic permitting, we'll visit the Getty Villa in Malibu, one of the world's foremost collections of ancient art housed in the imposing reconstruction of an ancient Roman villa. We'll archive our favorite discoveries, some obvious and some intriguingly obscure, in a digital museum which our class will co-create from scratch. But this will be a treasure hunt with a difference: while pursuing it we'll develop critical awareness about the very nature of ancient Greece and Rome and its legacies. Some of the questions to discuss are: What does the term `classical' convey? How might we weigh this supposed classicism against other traditions? Which ancient voices are heard and which remain silent? To whom do the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome belong? What are the ethics involved in collecting classical antiquities? How does antiquity `read' our very selves, individually and collectively? All are welcome, whether you're new to ancient studies or an old hand. Newcomers will get a uniquely experiential introduction to ancient Greece and Rome. Others will have the opportunity to deepen selected aspects of their classical knowledge. All students will emerge from the class with a broad overview of Greco-Roman pasts; will appreciate the range of human engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity, particularly in its local and regional manifestations; will understand the nature of the 'classical' in relation to other artistic traditions; will understand the role of ancient Greece and Rome in relation to fundamental human values and questions.

What is happiness? Might writing your own (mock) obituary help you find happiness? What else can you do to be happy? What has happiness to do with the good life? Does happiness define the meaning and purpose of life for people everywhere? In this course, we combine reading, discussion, group activity, and fieldtrip to figure out, collectively over the course of 2.5 weeks, what happiness is all about. We consider what philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, writers, and artists have to say about happiness and reflect on its relationship to wealth, wisdom, health, love, pleasure, justice, community, spirituality, and mortality. We give equal weight to Chinese and Western sources and interrogate deeply held assumptions through the lens of cross-cultural inquiry. During the summer, students read a novel and a popular treatise. In September, we review these texts and place them alongside scholarly works, movies, short fiction, and social commentary as we interrogate the chimera of happiness. In addition, we will experiment with meditation, short-form life writing (including mock obituaries!), and service-learning. We meet daily for lectures and seminar discussion. Students submit three short reflective papers and three online commentaries, and in small groups make an oral presentation and do a creative exercise.

"last night a DJ saved my life" --Indeep (1982 song) In a moment that has been widely described being defined by "remix culture," what might we learn from the traditions and practices of the artists who gave us the remix? This course looks at the DJ as an crucial figure, a rhetor even, who influences both US and world culture and examines the DJ's practices as writing practices. From there we ask how other kinds of writing--public, academic, creative--can be informed by DJs and DJ culture. We will study specific practices like scratching, remixing, and the mixtape as well as different approaches and spaces in which DJs have shaped culture, from disco to Hip Hop to world music, from radio DJs to party DJs to beat-juggling and turntablism. In addition to our readings, viewings and work in class, participants in the course will be able to participate in a DJ workshop introducing basic techniques like mixing, and will attend at least 1 live DJ set in San Francisco or Oakland. The course will make turntables and a DJ controller available for students to work on mixes and DJ techniques live, in class.

The world is filled with electronic devices! There seem to be more and more all the time. Wouldn't it be cool to hack and build stuff? Bend electronics to your will? Cloud connect your own stuff? Dream It, Build It is a great place to start. Designed for folks with no experience, it will take you from zero to capable in short order. We will show you some of the worst kept secrets of how things are built and help you build stuff of your own. We'll start out with some basics about how to build things, how to measure things, how to hook stuff together and end up being able to make cloud-connected gizmos. [This is a SOPHOMORE COLLEGE course. Visit soco.stanford.edu for full details.]

(Formerly GEOLSCI 10SC) The average person in the United States uses ~25 tons (the weight of approximately 20 mid-size cars) of raw materials every year to maintain our modern lifestyle. These materials, especially metals, are mined from rare and unique places where geological forces have concentrated such elements. Most people are aware of the destruction that has been wrought by past and present mines to obtain these metals, and from an environmental standpoint are actively against many or all mining projects. Such an environmental stance may be difficult to maintain in the future, however, given the urgent need to combat the climate crisis. Put simply, the most likely path to eliminating fossil fuel use is the electrification of the world, or the 'green economy.' This new infrastructure (including energy generation, such as wind farms; energy storage, such as batteries; energy transport, such as electrical wires; and electrified everything, including cars, planes, tractors, lawn mowers, etc.) will require massive quantities of mineral resources in order to achieve at the necessary scale. It is estimated that the world will require annual production increases of ~450% for battery metals such as lithium or cobalt and increases of 10% for base metals such as copper to meet the demand in energy technologies predicted by 2050. This means increasing mine production by over an order of magnitude even for base metals. Further, once used in infrastructure these metals cannot be recycled, meaning that the path to our green future most likely involves more mining of these critical metals. The question then becomes how we can sustainably produce these mineral resources at the least societal and environmental cost. You will: how geological forces create mineral deposits; the basic geological history of Montana; visit past an environmental Superfund site at a historical mine and what is being done to remediate it; Visit existing mines to learn about the mine production process, environmental problems, and modern remediation techniques;Meet with mining, civic, and environmental stakeholders at a controversial mining project. This course will involve several days on Stanford campus learning about the scale of mineral resources predicted to be necessary for the green economy as well as basic ore geology. We will then travel to the Judson Mead Field Station in the Tobacco Root Mountains of southwestern Montana. This will be our home for a six-day fieldtrip exploring Montana geological history and mining issues. We will return to Stanford to complete a short research project on a controversial mine project, and investigate possible alternatives. Projects will be presented to the class and the broader SoCo community. While we may not reach conclusions to the multi-faceted question about how best to produce these resources, you will know the issues, problems, and possibilities associated with sustainably producing the metals needed for the green revolution.

Since at least World War II, the San Francisco Bay Area has served as a center for LGBTQ life in the United States. It emerged early as a place where queer people could congregate and interact more freely, but it also was frequently at the vanguard when it came to organizing around issues of gender and sexuality. At the same time, as some queer communities of the Bay Area have done extremely well, others have continued to have to struggle for their rights, their place and their say. This course explores the genesis and legacy of different queer communities and explores their impact on Bay Area culture. Topics discussed will include the Beats, lesbian separatism, the response to AIDS, the relationship between different LGBTQ communities and the police, trans activism, prostitution and sex worker rights. The course combines literature, art and poetry of seven decades with historical documents, as well as local visits and walking tours. The last third of the course allows students to pursue archival or oral history research projects, as students unearth their own stories of queer San Francisco.

Join two Stanford professors for a week of immersive, expert introduction to humanities research. This intensive, one-week course introduces rising sophomores to the excitement and wonder of humanities research, along the way preparing you for independent research projects, for working as a research assistant for a Stanford professor, or just for the next step in your Stanford career. No humanities background is necessary. Think of this class as humanities research in a nutshell: over 5 days, we'll take a deep dive into some of the most important methods and questions driving scholarly research in the humanities. Our laboratory will be the Special Collections Library at Stanford, where we'll conduct hands-on research in ancient and modern books, maps, objects, and manuscripts, from ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets to materials from San Francisco's Chinatown. We're also planning a field trip to the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Over the week, we'll teach you how to formulate a solid research question; how to gather the evidence that will help you to answer that question; how to write up research results; how to critique the research of your fellow students; how to deliver your results in a public setting; and how to write a really great grant proposal. Students who complete this course become eligible for follow-up student research grants during their next year. So if you have a larger project in mind - a capstone project, or even a senior thesis idea - this course can help set the stage for that next step. Learning Goals: Introduction to humanities research methods; Conceptualization of a major humanities research project; Skills and familiarity with working with archival materials; Oral presentation skills.

The world-famous landscapes of East Africa, including Serengeti National Park, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Rift Valley lakes of Tanzania form the backdrop for this special course on protected area conservation, its impacts on local people, and alternative models that simultaneously promote conservation while creating local community benefits. We take full advantage of the special format of Sophomore College, spending an initial week on campus with lectures and lively discussions on these topics, before flying together on a 12-day expedition to northern Tanzania to witness firsthand the challenges of parks and peoples in this classic setting. Summer reading is designed to help us all prepare for the experience. Students will also undertake research on a related subject of interest to them by drawing on the literature to develop and present a final paper to the class, providing a closer look at key places and issues we'll consider. Joining us for the travel segment of the class, and a few days on campus, will be a group of Stanford alumni who have an interest in these same topics. The course will explore the pros and cons of parks and protected areas as they affect both wildlife and human inhabitants, and to address the dilemma of how to achieve conservation in a manner that creates benefits for local people and promotes social justice. We will look at the history of specific protected areas to ask: What approach to protected area (PA) conservation has been taken in each case? Who are the key proponents and what are their main social and ecological objectives? How successful has the protected area been at achieving its conservation goals? In what ways is climate change affecting that success? What are the benefits of the PA to people and who receives them? What are the costs of the PA to people and who pays them? Where benefits are not commensurate to costs, what, if anything, is being done to address the imbalance? How well is it working? Are there alternative conservation models that would make the interests of parks and people more compatible, and reduce the tradeoffs between them? What is needed to make these alternative models work? The travel portion of the class will help us take an on-the-ground look at these questions. We are scheduled to visit Tarangire, Lake Manyara, Mt. Meru, and Serengeti National Parks, plus the Maramboi Wildlife Management Area, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and nearby Maasai villages. Please note that students are required to read four books over the summer, to reflect on them in two short essays (2-3 pages each), one due in July and the other in August, and to come to campus in the fall well-prepared to discuss each reading and co-lead a class discussion on at least one of them. A 6- to 8-page final paper will be based on literature research on an approved topic, focused on Tanzania or nearby. Students will be expected to present main findings of that paper during an evening seminar as we travel.

Deliberative democracy is a political theory that holds that democracy should be based on informed, respectful, and inclusive public deliberation. In this SoCo course, we explore the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and deliberative democracy, and examine how AI can be used to support and enhance the democratic process through deliberative democracy. This course will focus on the use of AI in the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform (a collaboration between the Crowdsourced Democracy Team and Deliberative Democracy Lab, both at Stanford), the ethics of AI and democracy, and the potential for AI to support deliberation and participation. The course will also explore the challenges and limitations of using AI in a democratic context and the need for effective regulation and governance of AI.

Monterey Bay supports an amazing diversity of marine life, important fisheries, and coastal agriculture. There is much to explore here, from a submarine canyon that rivals the Grand Canyon in scope to Elkhorn Slough, California's second largest estuary. A day on the Bay can reveal a fleet of purse-seine vessels searching for squid, sport fishermen seeking salmon and halibut, and humpback whales breaching as they feed on anchovies ? all within a relatively small area. What are the oceanographic and biological processes that support these creatures and human endeavors? How do they vary in different parts of the Bay? How are these processes linked to the fog that dominates the coastal climate and is critical to local agriculture? We will address these questions through lectures, discussion, and field work using the restored Western Flyer ? the ship John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took to the Gulf of California in 1940, resulting in publication of Sea of Cortez. You will collect oceanographic and biological data at sea using a variety of research instruments, including remotely operated video platforms, echosounder (sonar), water-column profiler, and plankton-imaging microscope. These observations will be related to the processes and trophic webs in the bay, moving all the way from wind to whales. At Elkhorn Slough we will observe sea otters and birds from kayaks. We will analyze water and sediment samples for nutrients and other properties and compare our results to real-time data from moorings in the slough and bay. We will learn about agriculture, the largest economic driver in Monterey County, and its connections to Monterey Bay through fog, nutrient runoff into Elkhorn Slough, and seawater intrusion into critical aquifers. We will also dive into Monterey Bay's rich cultural and literary history in developing a holistic view that will reveal a dynamic ocean from new viewpoints and build teamwork skills that are essential to working at sea. Our base of operation will be Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. We will make several relevant field trips on land. On four days, we will use the Western Flyer as our at-sea classroom (all day trips--we will spend all nights on land). Three days of ship time will be devoted to studying spawning squid and feeding whales and carrying out an oceanographic transect across the Bay from kelp forest to canyon. An additional day will be devoted to collecting data for projects of your own design. We will spend three days at Elkhorn Slough and in the Pajaro Valley agricultural area. You will use the data collected (and analyzed!) and experiences formed during our explorations to create individual or team projects. Projects will be presented at a symposium on the second last day. The last day of SoCo will feature a final morning of reflection on the shore of Monterey Bay before you return to Stanford.

Our understanding of warfare often derives from the lofty perspective of political leaders and generals: what were their objectives and what strategies were developed to meet them? This top-down perspective slights the experience of the actual combatants and non-combatants caught in the crossfire. This course focuses on the complexity of the process by which strategy is translated into tactical decisions by the officers and foot soldiers and on what actually occurs on the field of battle. We will visit Washington, DC, and meet with national security officials and members of non-government organizations there. In addition, we will spend a day visiting the battlefields of Gettysburg (July 1863) in Pennsylvania, and the Little Bighorn (June 1876) in Montana. The course's battlefield tours are based on the "staff rides" developed by the Prussian Army in the mid-1800s and employed by the U.S. Army since the early 1900s. While at Stanford, students will conduct extensive research on individual participants at Gettysburg and Little Bighorn. Then, as we walk through the battlefield sites, students will brief the group on their subjects' experience of battle and on why they made the decisions they did. Why did Lt. General Longstreet oppose the Confederate attack on the Union Army at Gettysburg? What was the experience of a military surgeon, vivandiere, or nurse on a Civil War battlefield? What role did just war principles or law play in the treatment of enemy fighters and civilians? Why did Custer divide his 7th Cavalry troops as they approached the Little Bighorn River? What was the role of Lakota Sioux women after a battle? The final part of the class covers contemporary military conflicts discussing what the US public, political leaders, and military commanders have learned (and not learned) from the past. The course is open to students from a range of disciplines; an interest in the topic is the only prerequisite.

This course explores the origins of policing in Latin America and some of the contemporary challenges in the relationship between citizens, police forces and the state in the Western Hemisphere. By taking a long-term perspective, we seek to understand why highly unequal countries in Latin America (and the US) have faced such difficulties in effectively providing citizen security while ensuring the respect of fundamental human rights. We will connect such failures both to historical debates regarding the legacies of colonialism and contemporary debates regarding forced displacements and migratory flows. The provision of security in Latin America has often been plagued by torture, excessive use of force, military deployments and police brutality. During the colonial era, political order was often imposed using the coercive force of the State to police settlement patterns, repress indigenous rebellions, and chase runaway enslaved peoples. Police forces in Latin America are often unable to contain crime, while poor citizens in urban favelas or remote villages often need to resort to solutions that bypass or even challenge the State in its monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, or seek to escape their precarious conditions through migration. We will explore both the origins of these policing failures, and their effects in terms of migratory flows to both the US and Latin America today. Movie club and salon: Class sessions will be enriched with cinema screenings in the evenings of movies and documentaries that will bring to life some of the issues discussed in class. Those screenings will include a zoom segment to allow for a follow up discussion with directors, producers or a relevant expert. Field trips: We will seek to have three field trips. One will be a visit to libraries containing historical documents of the colonial era. A second one will be a visit to a California Mission. A third trip will be a visit to the Salinas Valley or Half Moon Bay, to learn about the challenges faced by undocumented indigenous migrants in agricultural areas of California. If possible, we will arrange a fourth trip visit police headquarters in Oakland, to learn about contemporary efforts at police reform in the US.

This course will explore the resilience challenges that coastal areas in the American West must deal with in the face of climate change. These include problems such as projected sea level rise, flooding, land subsidence, drought-stressed water supply, pollution, unsustainable fishing practices, wildfires, and erosion. Solutions to these problems - such as sea walls, levees, and grey infrastructure like dams and reservoirs - are often controversial and the politics over them happens at all levels of government. Some of this controversy occurs along partisan lines, but even in the politically bluest areas adjacent to the oceans and bays, many communities have been slow to take on the planning and actions needed to protect people and property from future extreme weather challenges. Traveling up and down the West coast, this course will combine classroom instruction with visits to the communities, facilities and agencies involved in coastal resilience from the Canadian to the Mexican border. We will look at solutions like conventional desalination that have been debated and implemented for decades, but also novel possibilities such as wave-powered desalination. We will discuss the relative merits of creating more water storage through groundwater recharge and water recycling versus building more dams and reservoirs. And as we have done in the past with Bill Lane Center Sophomore Colleges, we will meet with relevant policy experts and public officials from governmental agencies, utilities, universities, and public interest groups. The course will conclude with group presentations by the students.

In this course, students advance their Spanish language proficiency as they deepen their critical consciousness of the social, cultural, and historic forces rooted in Indigenous and Latinx California. As we travel to three California Missions and the San Francisco Mission District, we'll explore original and secondary texts that take us back in time to tribes before the Missions, to the devastation of the Mission system and Indigenous resistance to it, and to Latinx communities today. Students will engage deeply with community members and leaders, as well as each other!

Who doesn't love going to a play: sitting in the darkened theater, a member of the audience community waiting to be entertained, charmed, and challenged? But how many of us know enough about the details of the plays, their interpretation, their production, and acting itself, to allow us to appreciate fully the theatrical experience? In this seminar, we will spend 14 days in Ashland, Oregon, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), where we will attend these plays: Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Macbeth, and Coriolanus; Jane Eyre, adapted by Elizabeth Williamson from the novel by Charlotte Bronte; Liz Duffy Adams' Born With Teeth; Lizard Boy, Books, Music, and Lyrics by Justin Huertas; and Behfarmaheen (If You Please), a one-person show by and with Barzin Akhavan. (To read more about these productions, go to www.osfashland.org). We will also spend time backstage, meeting with actors, designers, and artistic and administrative directors of OSF. Students read the plays before the seminar begins, attend these productions together, and have the time to study one play closely through a second viewing. In Ashland, students will produce a staged reading and design a final paper based on one or more of the productions. These reviews will be delivered to the group and turned in on Thursday, September 19.