A rising ninth grader and aspiring lawyer, Jake loves the hands-on learning style of his Criminal Investigations and Mock Trial courses at Explo at Wellesley. He sees the program as a great way to get a taste of the college experience.
Yesterday in Criminal Investigations we split up into two groups and came up with our own crimes. Ours was a therapist who fakes her own death before arranging the murder of her two bosses. We had to create an entire crime scenes with evidence — we planted fake guns under tables, created mock blood splatters, left footprints, everything. Then, each group switched to a different crime scene and tried to solve each other's cases. It took a couple of days, but by the end of today, we solved both of them! And tomorrow, a guy from the police station is going to come with a lie detector and do the whole test on us, so I'm excited about that.
My other class is Mock Trial. Right now we're running the actual trial that we've been preparing for the past week or so. I'm on the prosecution side, and we presented today. It went really well, so I'm feeling good about that. The other side goes tomorrow and then we hear the verdict at the end.
If I was describing Explo to someone who was thinking of coming here, I'd say the main thing is you have to be mature. It's not like any other summer camp. You're basically going to college at age 13. And to me, that's awesome.
Liam Brooks