Hundreds of first-year students are seeing the U of A for the first time. They are learning which sidewalks cut the corner on the way to class, where the dining halls are and what an August afternoon feels like hiking the hill.
Gabi Cardenas moved into Futrall Hall last week. But she is unpacking on a campus where she has already lived three times.
Cardenas, a first-year biomedical engineering student from Austin, Texas, spent three high school summers on campus at the Engineering Summer Academy, the College of Engineering's flagship residential camp for ninth through 11th graders.
She's slept in Gibson and Gregson Halls, eaten at 1021 Dining Hall and walked to Bell Engineering Center every morning. By the time she filled out a college application, the campus 500 miles from her front door was the one she knew best.
"One of the reasons I committed was it felt so familiar," Cardenas said. "I already knew the campus. It feels like home to me."
She applied to eight colleges, including engineering schools in her home state. Arkansas won for a reason no brochure can manufacture: she had already lived here, one week at a time.
That is exactly how the college's summer camps are designed to work, according to the staff who run the camps. The College of Engineering runs a portfolio of camps reaching students from first through 11th grade, on campus and in eight communities across Arkansas.
The Engineering Summer Academy sits at the top of it, drawing as many as 80 high schoolers from across the country for a faculty-led overnight week.
The camps are a long game.
They are built on the idea that students choose what they know, and that a university can become a comfortable second home years before the admissions deadline.
The Straw and the Cup
Cardenas can point to the moment engineering stopped being a subject and started being an identity.
It happened at a long table during one of her first summers on campus, in a session led by an industrial engineering professor. The campers became an assembly line. There were cups, straws and a stack of fake orders to fill, and the group's job was to reorganize itself, round after round, until the line ran as efficiently as it could. Cardenas had one task: pick up the cup, put in the straw, pass it on.
"I was just a worker among those people, but it felt impactful, because the line would have changed if one person wasn't there," she said. "You really need to be a team player to be an engineer."
Somewhere in the middle of the exercise, an idea landed that she still repeats like a life lesson.
"The way I was taught at Arkansas was, an engineer is someone who wants to make the world better," she said. "At its core, you want to make something better. I feel like that's what clicked in my mind. This is something I could be, and this is something I want to be."
Her path to that epiphany started earlier and smaller. During the pandemic, she took part in one of the college's online camps as a seventh grader. When in-person camps resumed, her mother mentioned that the U of A was hosting one for high schoolers and asked if she wanted to go. She said sure.
She came back after her sophomore year, and again after her junior year, the last summer she was eligible.
She tried the non-living systems track twice, drawn to the computing and coding she had grown up around, then switched to chemical engineering in her final year just to learn something new.
She was sorted into one of the camp's small groups, called families, and hers became the closest at camp. They ate every meal together, even when they didn't have to, and played the card game Spoons at every single one.
One of her college application essays was about how Spoons helped her decide to become an engineer.
Why Biomedical
Cardenas chose to major in biomedical engineering for reasons that live close to home. Both of her grandmothers have been affected by cancer. Her oldest sister was diagnosed with brain cancer and is doing well now. But Cardenas watched the doctors and the technology that carried her family through it.
"All I could think about was the technology that helped change her life, that helped diagnose it and helped treat it," she said. "I want to be able to make an impact, to help other people get diagnosed and help make more advances, so we can save more lives."
A Presence, Not a Pitch
Teresa Simpson, the college's associate director of enrollment management, who oversees the summer camps, has watched this pattern repeat itself many times.
Each year, three to five Engineering Summer Academy campers enroll at the university, and eight current engineering majors on this summer's camp staff credit the camps as the reason they are here. Former campers become counselors, and counselors become the reason the next camper comes back.
The strategy behind it starts far earlier than high school. Research points to fourth through sixth grade as the window when students begin identifying what they want to be, Simpson said, which is why the college's camps begin with first graders and why its outreach does not wait for students to visit Fayetteville.
Last spring, the college made 49 classroom visits across Arkansas, part of a campaign that contacts every school in the state, and its travel camps now operate in eight communities, from Bentonville to Camden.
"We want them to recognize us as a presence throughout their education," Simpson said. "We're not just seeing them at their college fair when they're in 11th grade."
"We try to reach out to every corner of Arkansas that we can," she added. "If we don't, we're not doing our due diligence as a land-grant institution."
The camps hold themselves to standards built on American Camp Association practices, with staff completing a 50-hour training that includes certification in CPR, first aid and AED use.
Every counselor who works with campers carries that training into the week.
Full Circle
For Cardenas, the people mattered more than any single project. Her mentor during her last summer, a student counselor named Anna Barnhart, made her "family" of campers actually feel like one.
"She always made a point to check up on you," Cardenas said. "She always listened. She made us all feel seen and heard."
Barnhart said she took her job of creating a safe and special environment for campers very seriously.
"We never know what these weights these campers carry at home, so my responsibility was to hopefully make their week a little lighter while at camp," she said.
When Cardenas committed to Arkansas, Simpson was the first person she told. Anna was the second.
Now she is on the other side of the week she loved. After her first year, camp staff positions open to her, and she intends to apply. During her own camp summers, she would sit in the hallway with the counselors before lights out, talking until the day ran out. She wants to be the one sitting in that hallway.
She already has an answer for the next camper who shows up from somewhere far away, feeling awkward and out of place, the way she did her first summer.
"I would let them know to find something that will motivate them," she said. "Whatever I do, I want to do it with love. I love engineering. I love Arkansas. I love the people around me."
This week, while the rest of her class is learning the campus, Cardenas already knows where the birds are loudest in the morning and which door of Bell to use. All that remains is the other half of the circle.
"I grew so close with the counselors, and they're the ones who really motivated me to want to go to Arkansas," she said. "I want to be able to have that impact and influence on someone else that they had on me."
About the College of Engineering: The University of Arkansas College of Engineering is the state's largest engineering school, offering graduate and undergraduate degrees, online studies and interdisciplinary programs. It enrolls more than 4,700 students and employs more than 150 faculty and researchers along with nearly 200 staff members. Its research enterprise generated $47 million in new research awards in Fiscal Year 2025. The college's strategic plan, Vision 2035, seeks to build the premier STEM workforce in accordance with three key objectives: Initiating lifelong student success, generating transformational and relevant knowledge, and becoming the destination of choice among educators, students, staff, industry, alumni and the community. As part of this, the college is increasing graduates and research productivity to expand its footprint as an entrepreneurial engineering platform serving Arkansas and the world. The college embraces its pivotal role in driving economic growth, fueling innovation and educating the next generation of engineers, computer scientists and data scientists to address current and future societal challenges.