Hotchkiss Summer Portals

A student takes one course for the whole of a two-week intake and stays with it from start to finish. Teaching runs in two blocks, mid-morning and early afternoon, with Saturday mornings included, and it is taught by Hotchkiss faculty and by instructors from partner institutions such as the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DNA Learning Center and Grand Central Atelier. The choice spans laboratory genetics, environmental field science and advanced environmental research, robotics, model rocketry, aircraft design, the physics of the electric guitar, baseball analytics, piano performance, observational drawing, speech and debate, and writing. Several courses end in something the student takes away: a built electric guitar, a competition-legal rocket, a flown remote-control aircraft, a digital drawing portfolio, a finished speech, a first draft of a research paper. A student may take two courses across the two intakes, but not two in the same one.

Tuition is all-inclusive. It covers the dormitory room, all meals in the dining hall, course expenses and materials, health centre care, and the afternoon, evening and weekend activities that the whole programme shares, including the off-campus trips a course builds in. Travel to and from campus is arranged by the family. A separate application fee is charged once per application and is listed under extras. A small number of specialised afternoon options carry an additional fee, because the school hires extra staff or buys extra materials for them; the school does not publish those amounts, so they are not listed here — ask us and we will request them.

Students live in the school’s dormitories on campus. Roommates are assigned by the Director of Residential Life wherever possible, so most students share a twin room, and a student is given the dormitory assignment and introduced to the roommate on arrival. Each room has a bed, mattress, bureau, desk, desk chair, telephone and closet space. The mattress is a twin extra-long and bed linens are not provided: families bring pillow, bedding and towels, or mail them ahead of arrival. Laundry facilities are in the basement of most dormitories and students bring their own detergent; there is no laundry service in the summer. Basic toiletries can be bought at the campus store on the lower level of the Main Building.

All meals are taken in the school dining hall, with peers and faculty at the same tables. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are part of the day’s required check-ins on weekdays and Saturdays, and Sunday runs to a brunch and a dinner. Meals are included in tuition and there is no separate meal plan to buy. The kitchen draws part of its produce from the school’s own Fairfield Farm.

Late afternoons and evenings are activity time, and taking part is expected rather than optional. Students swim in the pool and in the lake, play basketball, intramural soccer, beach volleyball, wiffle ball and kickball, hike the school’s trails, do arts and crafts, sing karaoke, watch films and sit round bonfires. Weekends bring events on campus and outings to the surrounding area, and several courses build their own trips: a professional baseball game and the Baseball Hall of Fame for the analytics course, a research institute and a forest laboratory for advanced environmental science, and a concert series for the pianists. An advisory group meets daily between class and activities.

The campus covers more than eight hundred acres of forests, pastures, streams and lakes in the Berkshire foothills, and Portals uses the same buildings as the school year. Science courses work in the Griswold Science Building and in the school’s EFX fabrication laboratory, an engineering space built for science fabrication projects; art courses work in the Cullman Art Center; pianists perform in Katherine Elfers Hall on a Fazioli 308 concert grand. The Edsel Ford Memorial Library has carrels, group study rooms, media rooms and online databases. The Mars Athletic Center holds the sports halls and the pool, which opens when a lifeguard is on duty. The Wieler Health Center runs a weekday clinic with a reduced weekend schedule, and the Portals physician and nurse are on call at all hours; a hospital is an eight-minute drive away. There is a dining hall, a campus store and a campus post office.

The programme is deliberately narrow and deliberately unplugged. A student spends two weeks on one subject, with the people who do that subject for a living, and the structure of the day — check-ins, advisory, mandatory activities, dormitory check-in at night — leaves a lot of room inside it. Phones, laptops and tablets are handed in at registration and returned near the end of the session, with class-time exceptions for courses that need a machine; the school’s reasoning is that two weeks is short enough that friendships have to form fast, and they form in conversation. Students come from across the United States and from abroad, and the debating and laboratory work is done alongside them. Faculty and Summer Fellows live on the corridors and meet arrivals in the Main Circle on opening day.