Students and faculty reflect on how the intellectual freedom and the wide open spaces of the Mountaintop initiative have changed the way they think about education.
Innovation, creative and freedom are just a few words Lehigh University students used to describe their Mountaintop experience. In a large converted factory students used the open space for everything from designing a unique play area for children to finding new ways to better ventilate cooking huts in Uganda. Dedicated and driven, the groups worked through the summer learning from failures, relishing in successes and finding inspiration from peers.
Students are producing a documentary and building a website looking at race and diversity at Lehigh University during the Mountaintop Summer 2014 session.
Lehigh University students are eveloping a small scale model of a combined agricultural-hydroponic (aquaponic) system during the Mountaintop Summer 2014 session.
A group of Lehigh University students are designing a low-cost, aesthetically pleasing and functional prosthetic hand for developing countries like Cambodia during the Mountaintop Summer 2014 session.
The Mountaintop Summer 2014 Green Resource Recovery of Waste Project—GR²OW— is developing a method of bringing an on campus composting center to Lehigh University. The group is hoping to compost all food and yard waste and reuse the compost on campus.
Creativity, passion, interdisciplinary— Lehigh University students describe their Mountaintop Summer 2014 experience in just a few words, transforming a blank whiteboard into a colorful mosaic of expression.
One group of students participating in the Mountaintop Summer 2014 program at Lehigh University spent most of their time working outside of the building. The Innovation in Ventilation team built a small cooking hut out of sticks and mud to discover ways to improve ventilation in countries like Uganda.
Lehigh University's summer 2014 Mountaintop group "Shapeshifter" is designing new ways to invite play through creative structures. The project involves design and construction that will change in response to human presence. "The idea is to throw as much against the dart board as possible to see if something sticks," Ben Gingold said about coming up with different ways to create a new play experience.
Penn Scott '13 and his Xiphias team moved their research operation to Lehigh's Mountaintop last summer where they began researching automotive aerodynamics, support structures and powertrain systems. Their hope was to influence the design and engineering of high-performance cars. Watch how their supercar concept took shape and how their project is racing ahead.
At Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, we have always prepared students to put knowledge into practice. Building on our strong foundation, we are defining a new centerpiece in our development of the next generation of leaders and problem-solvers, one focused on posing big questions and seeking answers, where students learn to take risks and productively chart their own territory, where professors are guides, mentors and fellow explorers, in an environment emphasizing hands-on learning and unconstrained by traditional disciplinary boundaries. Mountaintop is not a research lab. It is not a business incubator. It is not just another interdisciplinary workspace. Mountaintop will transcend all existing models in higher education, and it will do so by returning higher education to its roots—by focusing not only on the questions, and not only on the answers, but rather on the processes that come before and after each: inquiry, exploration, and discovery.