About

The Secondary School Field Research Program (SSFRP), run by Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is a six-week, non-residential field research program based at the Piermont Marsh in New York, part of the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve. Students must be at least 16 and currently enrolled in high school or college; the program is commuter-only, with no housing provided. SSFRP runs on an annual application cycle with a deadline that has typically fallen in early March (March 2 for the 2026 cohort) — families planning for summer 2027 should expect the cycle to open in the preceding fall or winter, with a similar early-spring deadline likely. Exact program dates for a given summer are not published far in advance, so families should check the program's page as the application window approaches.

The program runs on a tiered mentoring structure: research teams pair high school students with one or two undergraduate mentors (many of them SSFRP alumni themselves) and a Lamont scientist as science support, with a teacher also attached to each team. After reading and discussing a scientific paper on the marsh, teams design their own sampling protocol and spend the summer collecting field samples and running lab experiments on real wetland science — nutrient cycling, natural carbon sequestration, non-chemical control of invasive plants, and more. Each team ends the summer with a research poster and oral presentation at a closing symposium, and supporting coursework in wetland ecology, field sampling, and data analysis runs through the program.

SSFRP's founding mission, according to Lamont's own reporting, is explicitly to bring more students of color into the earth sciences, a field where — by Lamont's own diversity researcher's count — nearly 90% of doctoral degrees nationally go to white students. Since its founding in 2006 by Lamont scientist Bob Newton, 85% of the program's roughly 400 alumni have been Black, Latinx, or South Asian, and about 80% attended schools where most students received subsidized meals; the program has drawn heavily from a set of partner NYC public high schools. As of 2020 reporting, the program was free to attend, with stipends provided to both students and teachers; current cost information is not published on the program page.

For a student, especially one from an underrepresented background in the earth sciences, who wants sustained, authentic mentored field research rather than a survey course, this is one of the more serious and long-running opportunities of its kind — real data, real scientists, a real symposium, not a simulation of research. It's not built for a student looking for a quick one- or two-week taste of science; the six-week, team-based, single-site model rewards a student ready to commit to one research question in depth.