I’m a CTY Lancaster veteran, and I have the frisbees to prove it.
Here’s the thing about CTY… its basically a nerd camp. Now, I don’t mean that in a bad way, its just that there are many kids who fit the stereotype of the reclusive antisocial kinda kid. The good thing, though, is that there are many kids like that, and so if you are one of those kids, its really the first time you meet kids like that and realize you’re not the only one. Anyways, by no means is that generalization true of all the people there… some of the most hillarious,social, and brilliant people I’ve met were once CTYers.
Also, CTY being a nerd camp, you realize there are many… eccentricities… about some of the traditions and people about it, but then again, thats one of the really unique things.
Long story short, there are always people that don’t like things. If you don’t let yourself open up to people, then of course its going to feel like a long three weeks, but thats true at just about anything. At Lancaster, they used to say something to the extent of while you’re there, it feels like a year, but once you leave, it feels like it lasted only a day. Personally, CTY was among the best things I’ve done, and I’m thinking about going back next year to RA or TA.
The only problem I’ve ever really had about it, though, is its big on liberal arts stuff, but not really science stuff. I took an “engineering” class the second time I was there, but it was all mainly introductory high school physics… if they had some more “hands on” building types of classes, that would be great. But then again, JHU’s strongest department is writing and medicine, so us engineers can expect only so much. I also was never a fan of the strict supervision and heavily-enforced-but-superfluous rules.
