Summer Springboard
Humanities & Liberal Arts
ACADEMIC TRACK
About This Track
Summer Springboard’s Humanities & Liberal Arts track empowers high school students to build a strong foundation in critical thinking, cultural understanding, and effective written and verbal expression.
Through courses like Communication & Society, participants are guided in unpacking pressing social themes—think race, gender, culture, diversity, and conflict resolution—through discussion, writing, and presentations. These experiences cultivate emotional intelligence, social awareness, and the ability to advocate with clarity and confidence.
Designed to enrich nearly any career path, this track hones transferable skills essential across professions—whether you’re headed into engineering, nursing, business, education, or beyond. Students emerge more articulate, thoughtful, and ready to engage with the complexities of the world around them.
With its emphasis on empathy, communication, and cultural literacy, this track sharpens not just academic prowess but also personal awareness and global perspective.
Courses In This Track
Whatever you do in life, humanities and liberal arts are the foundation towards a successful career path. Integral to being a well rounded person include an appreciation for world cultures and language/writing skills.
Communication & Society
Course
Are you interested in learning how you can make a positive impact on the world through your future career? This course is focused on developing communication skills pertaining to important topics impacting all professions. Topics include gender, race, culture, diversity, and inclusion.
Interpersonal communication on complex topics, dealing with conflict, and the development, maintenance and termination of personal and professional relationships will be discussed. Through writing assignments, class discussions and a final group presentation, students will explore and engage with concepts that encourage critical thinking about identities and a vision for a more compassionate, equitable, and less harmful world.
This course can support all future careers. We live in a world where knowledge of the complexities of social identities is vital to success. Even more important, is the ability to communicate comfortably about these complexities. Students will explore their own social emotional intelligence and how tapping into this can help them in any future career from construction management, to engineering, to psychology, to business, to ethnic studies to a future as a nurse or educator.
Campuses with this course:
Foundations in Literature & Writing
Course
Immerse yourself in the literary heritage of Oxford University, where some of the world’s greatest writers studied, taught, and created their masterpieces. This program combines the magic of Oxford’s historic setting with intensive writing and literature study, allowing you to walk in the footsteps of literary legends while developing your own creative voice. You’ll experience the traditional Oxford tutorial system while exploring the city’s rich literary history and visiting the places that inspired countless famous works. From the medieval halls where Tolkien crafted Middle-earth to the pubs where the Inklings met to discuss their writing, you’ll discover how Oxford’s unique atmosphere has fostered literary genius for centuries.
Through daily writing practice, literary analysis, and exploration of Oxford’s literary landmarks, you’ll develop both your writing skills and deep appreciation for the literary tradition you’re joining.
Campuses with this course:
Theater Arts
Course
Utilizing the elements and principles of stage design, it covers the development of concepts for visual narrative through critical script and text analysis, research, and discussions of professional best practices. Practical projects explore the relationships between environment, object, and text, and enact examples of visual metaphor/storytelling via varied mediums (specifically scenery, light/projection, and costumes).
Campuses with this course:
World History
Course
Are you the next Indiana Jones? Majoring in history teaches students to think critically, communicate effectively, and solve complex problems, while also deepening their understanding of other peoples and cultures. Sample what Cal Poly’s History department has to offer in this World History seminar on the Transatlantic Slave Trade through primary sources.
More than 12 million Africans were enslaved and taken across the Atlantic aboard more than 36,000 slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Approximately 1,500 of these ships – containing more than 200,000 African captives – were captured by the British Royal Navy in the nineteenth century. The documents seized aboard these ships and the interrogations of members of their crews produced in trials at Vice Admiralty courts around the British Empire reveal important details about how the slave trade operated.
In this seminar, students will work with archival manuscript sources from the nineteenth century to explore the organization and operation of the slave trade and the efforts of abolitionists and enslaved Africans to resist it.
Campuses with this course:
Summer Springboard
Speak with our Admissions Team
*Summer Springboard programs are not run by our campus partners (with the exception of Cal Poly and NYSID which are run in partnership with SSB). Universities and their affiliated departments and partners do not control and are not responsible or liable in any manner for any part of the Summer Springboard program.