Deadline: January 31, 2014
A mountaineering adventure and learning experience for young women. Girls on Ice is a unique, FREE, wilderness science education program for high school girls that takes place in the North Cascades in Washington state and on a glacier in Alaska. The aim is to give girls a feeling for the natural processes that create the alpine world and provide an environment that fosters the critical thinking necessary to all scientific inquiry.
Each year a team of 9 teenage girls and 3 instructors spend 12 days exploring and learning about mountain glaciers and the alpine landscape through scientific field studies with professional glaciologists, ecologists, mountain guides, and artists. The program encourages the girls to observe and think like scientists by making observations and inferences. They develop their own experiments to test ideas and answer questions.
Sponsorship
Tuition is free. Girls will have to provide transportation to Seattle or Fairbanks and very minimal equipment and clothing. Girls on Ice will provide as much financial assistance as they can to ensure that every girl can go, regardless of economic situation, and they will provide all technical equipment and clothing..
Eligibility
To be eligible, girls must be at least 15 years old by June 20, and no older than 18 on August 8.
Selection Criteria
Girls are not chosen based on their individual applications, Girls on Ice chooses the team as a whole. They are not necessarily looking for the girls with the best grades or the girls with the most awards – they look at the whole person.
These are the overall criteria for building our team:
- Diversity of backgrounds
- Diversity of interests and life experiences
- Opportunity: this is a unique experience that is free to the girls, therefore they look for girls who stand to gain the most from this experience – especially girls who have not had many opportunities to truly challenge themselves.
For more information, click here.
