UW hosts first community college summer institute on real-world problems

Five community college students spent the last week of May moving between the University of Wyoming’s Insect Museum and the Innovation Wyrkshop, working on housing insecurity and habitat loss instead of sitting through a standard campus orientation.

UW said its first Community College Summer Institute ran May 26-30 and brought together students from UW and four Wyoming community colleges. The five-day program centered on the science of learning and used collaborative, problem-based work to push students into what UW called wicked problems, with Kristy Oster of the Natrona County Collective Health Trust discussing the housing crisis in Natrona County and UW graduate students tying human housing pressures to habitat loss in insect populations.

The institute was designed by Rachel Watson of the UW Science Initiative’s Learning Actively Mentoring Program. Its roots go back to Vicky Mayfield, a retired Eastern Wyoming College mathematics professor, working with EWC faculty member Sherri Warren on the idea of a summer institute that would teach the science of learning through authentic interdisciplinary problem solving. UW said the program also drew support from a small NASA Space Grant Consortium seed grant and from UW graduate and undergraduate peer mentors who helped guide the students through the week.

That matters in Albany County because the story is not just about one summer program in Laramie. It is about whether UW can turn short, hands-on experiences like this into a pipeline that brings more two-year college students to campus, deepens transfer ties across Wyoming, and creates a stronger case for students to finish degrees in Laramie and stay in the state’s workforce. With only five community college students in the inaugural class, the scale was small, but the model was deliberate: expose students to UW’s labs, mentors and research tools early, and make the university feel like a place where transfer students can plug into real work quickly.

That fits UW’s broader Learning Actively Mentoring Program, which says it focuses on active-learning STEM research and on building collaboration opportunities for science instructors across Wyoming. It also fits a statewide system in which Wyoming community colleges and UW operate under statutory annual partnership-reporting requirements. For Albany County, the immediate payoff is not a headline-grabbing enrollment surge. The longer-term test is whether programs like this bring more students, more spending and more long-term talent into Laramie.