You'll get a taste of college life by creating your own course of study. You'll take two different classes during Hollinsummer -- one in the morning and one in the afternoon. No matter what your interests might be, you'll find something to both challenge and delight you. Choose two classes from the following list.

• Becoming a Leader
  Discover the natural leader within you. Effective leading requires developing personal insight, interpersonal skills, and vision—and then taking action. You’ll explore how you can become a more successful leader, and you’ll develop a plan to put your leadership skills into action in your own community.
• Creative Writing
  Hollins’ creative writing program is among the best of its kind in the nation. Working alongside other bright and talented students, you’ll gain greater insight into the ways writers develop ideas into a finished product. You’ll have the chance to write both poetry and fiction in workshop-based classes. Exercises are designed to prompt you to write original works in your own voice with an understanding of techniques. You’ll also keep a journal and do free writing, revision, and rewriting, always working toward finished pieces. All writing students contribute to an anthology that is published at the end of the program.
• Exploring Pottery
  In this studio art class, you'll have a chance to make useful and decorative objects as you experiment with constructing pinch pots, slab pots, and coiled pots. You'll also explore the basics of wheel throwing. Work will be fired in the kiln and ready for you to take home at the end of the class.
• Finding Hidden Meanings: Politics in Literature
  Is there a political message in the story of Chicken Little? Stuart Little? How does The Lord of the Rings differ from Harry Potter? Most works of fiction contain ideas about human nature that have immediate and obvious political implications. We’ll search for these ideas and critique them, in a number of works from both the Western tradition and elsewhere. We’ll even try our hand at fiction writing. By the end of the summer, you’ll never again read fiction, or even watch TV commercials, in the same way.
• Location, Location, Location: Learning Navigation Skills
  After you’ve taken this course, you’ll never lose your way again. You’ll not only learn to read maps, you’ll also learn to navigate using a compass, sextant, and GPS technology. The beautiful Hollins campus will be your playground and laboratory for this unusual class.
• Modern Dance
  Here’s your opportunity to put your ideas in motion. Through visualization, imaging, and imagination studies, you’ll explore using your body as an expressive instrument. Both experienced and inexperienced dancers are encouraged to improvise, make their own dances, and perform.
• Painting
  This class will be an introduction to oil painting, emphasizing proper use of materials and skills of observation. You will learn about color dynamics and how the properties of value, hue, and intensity contribute to making a painting. All work will be done in the studio from still-life setups. The class is open to beginning or experienced painters. A lab fee of $100 will cover oil paints, brushes and canvases.
• Photography
  This class provides an immersion in traditional black-and-white photography. You'll learn how to develop negatives, make high quality black-and-white prints, and mount prints for presentation. You'll use a Holga camera, an inexpensive "toy" camera that uses medium-format film. The plastic lens has the potential to alter reality in subtle and sometimes beautiful ways under certain conditions. When combined with good darkroom technique, the results can be very sophisticated. You'll use the state-of-the-art photography facilities in the Wetherill Visual Arts Center. There is a $100 fee for materials.
• Psychology: The Human Mind
  How do you think? How do you learn? How do you dream? The Human Mind is an owner's manual for the brain. Find out about the effects of drugs, the causes of schizophrenia, the ways that music can affect moods. Does hypnosis really work? Can you learn happiness? We’ll investigate memory, intelligence, biofeedback, the ways you deal with others, and the ways others deal with you.