Younger students are invited attend so they can learn what will be expected of them when they take the capstone. Cooperating landowners are also invited to the presentations and are provided with written copies of the report for their property. A couple of years ago several threads relating to the summer camp and the capstone seemed to come together. The course involves about a dozen faculty and a wide range of topics. Since students ideally take summer camp at the end of their sophomore year, they haven't had many of the professional courses yet.
Summer camp provides a brief introduction to a diverse array of topics.
For a number of reasons, over the years summer camp had lost much of its cohesion and had devolved to some extent into a series of independent exercises. There was general recognition that the integration across topic areas such as soils, ecology, measurements, silviculture, etc. wasn't occurring as well as it should have and that we couldn't be telling students how important it was to be able to integrate knowledge relevant one's professional field if we didn't provide an example of how to do it. Because this is an introductory course, we were looking for more horizontal, rather than vertical, integration across subject areas. I was seeing several problems in the capstone course. First, we tell students that the ability to work in a team is a critical skill in the workforce, and we expected them to work in teams in at least one other course besides summer camp and capstone, but we weren't providing any introduction to team skills until the capstone.