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For many 17-year-old students, the summer before senior year represents a last hurrah before the reality of planning for life after high school sets in. But for Angela Guerrero, the summer before senior year represents an important step in an already flourishing research career. She may be 17, but she's prepping for her final year in college, with plans to pursue an MD/PhD upon graduation.

Ruddock House junior Dan Emmons is representing the United States in the under-21 age division at the second World Youth Bridge Congress in Croatia. The computer science major describes bridge as a giant logic puzzle played out with cards. Alumnus Roger Lee ('09) is also competing, as a member of the under-26 U.S. team. 

When summer started, Caltech senior Yuyang Fan was handed a picture taken with a cell phone. The image showed a large box with an array of small fans covering one side. It was a wind tunnel—a simple one, but a wind tunnel nevertheless. Fan's mission? To build one himself as part of his SURF project. And the catch? Other than the picture, he was given nothing. "That's all the information I got," he says.

Like so many things in life, it all started with a girl. In fifth grade, the girl who sat next to Keith Hawkins every day in class would check out encyclopedias and look up subjects in astronomy, admiring pictures of swirling galaxies and colorful nebulae. Hawkins would join her, and the two of them would sit together and gaze at the heavens, one page at a time.

One looks like little more than a stethoscope head attached to a wire; the other seems to be an oven mitt with three metal disks sewn on. Simple, yes, but these prototype medical devices—developed by young Caltech researchers working on a SURF project—could one day save lives.

On Friday, August 5, at 7:30 p.m., and weekend nights thereafter through Saturday the 13th, the courtyard of the Lloyd House undergraduate residence at Caltech will transform into a theater with a pool of water for center stage. That pool will become by turns primal chaos, a washing basin, a swimming pool, the sea, and the Underworld's River Styx. 

Building upon the institute's mission to benefit society through research integrated with education, Caltech is opening its doors to 23 diverse and gifted high school sophomores and juniors this summer. The LEAD Summer Engineering Institute, held on campus July 6–27, gives students the opportunity to explore Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (or STEM) careers.

Students from Caltech won a large number of awards this spring, including a Fulbright grant, a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, three Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, two Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, a Xerox Technical Minority Scholarship, and 36 National Science Foundation Fellowships. 

If you're a student who's ever wanted to plan a manned space mission—or channel your inner Bruce Willis from the movie Armageddon—now's your chance. This September, Caltech will a host a workshop inviting about 20 graduate and undergraduate students from around the world to design a mission to an asteroid or comet in Earth's neighborhood—a so-called Near-Earth Object (NEO)—that would return a sample of rock or ice.

Ditch Day, that annual day of quirky college pranks and games at Caltech, is today! On one fateful day each spring—kept secret until the last minute—Caltech seniors ditch their classes and vanish from campus. The rooms of the absent students are vulnerable to all sorts of mischievous goings-on, so the seniors have devised elaborate mazes, scavenger hunts, and other challenging adventures to keep the underclassmen at bay.