After a couple years of being paused, Saturday Scholars will be kicking off again at the beginning of February.

Saturday Scholars, which is organized by science teacher Amanda Arteberry, is designed to allow students to get a feel for different careers in science and math after high school.

“Saturday Scholars is a program used throughout Madison County and St. Clair County,” Mrs. Arteberry said. “We meet every Saturday in February, three lectures and a field trip.”

The program was suspended for the past couple of years, with the last one being held in the 2019-2020 school year.

“My first year was 2017, but then the past two years, because of COVID-19, we haven’t been able to do it,” Mrs. Arteberry said.

While the topics of the lectures can change throughout the years, the field trip doesn’t. After the lectures are done, students in the Saturday Scholars program will do the Cadaver lab.

“Cadaver lab is a lab where we get to go to St. Louis University and we see cadavers, like dead people,” Mrs. Arteberry said. “It’s a dissected individual and medical students from SLU will go through the parts of it.”

One change over the past couple of years, has been the requirements to apply for the program, where previously students had to be enrolled in an honors or AP science or math course. Now, it’s open to any honors or AP course.

“I feel like some people are not taking AP and honors courses as much,” Mrs. Arteberry said, “so I didn’t know if I was going to get enough people to hit the 100 mark so I kind of branched out a little bit this year.”

And branching out is what junior Kaylah Cooper, who wants to go into criminal justice and biology, wanted to do with Saturday Scholars.

“I wanted to do Saturday Scholars because it sounded interesting and was a way to get my foot in the door of forensic science,” Cooper said.

Between both Cooper and senior Jessica Loyet, both had expressed interest in the Cadaver lab. According to Arteberry, the Cadaver lab is the most popular of the demonstrations.

“I am by far the most interested in the Cadaver lab,” Loyet said. “I am majoring in Environmental Biology, so this is most likely going to be my only opportunity to witness medical science from this lens.”