Online Weekend at NCSSM remains one of the most exciting parts of the program for its students. (photo: Brian Faircloth)
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Online students wrap up last weekend on campus for academic year
March 13, 2026
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More than 100 NCSSM Online students returned to campus for the final Online Weekend of the 2025-2026 academic year. For a good part of the weekend students from throughout North Carolina mixed and mingled with classmates and Residential students on both the Durham and Morganton campuses while also engaging in a number of advanced courses offered through the program. In total, in-person instruction in 15 courses was offered over the weekend, ranging from Honors Epidemiology and Honors Fundamentals of Object Programming to Cryptography to Western Political Thought and Honors Computational Atmospheric Physics.
Katherine Lockamy, from Wallburg in Davidson County, is a senior from Oak Grove High School. She has been a part of the NCSSM Online program for the last two years and has taken a number of programming courses. This semester, her last one in the NCSSM Online program, she is enrolled in Foundations of Data Science.
The Online program’s appeal, Katherine says, is in providing students with access to advanced courses not typically found in high school settings.
“We don’t really have classes like these at my home school at all,” she says. “It’s nice to have the chance to explore coding more and have access to teachers that can show me how to do all of that.”
It’s not just teachers who are providing the instruction, says Ashley Loftis, NCSSM-Durham’s Dan Teague Endowed Professor of Mathematics. Loftis had students in her Honors Topics in Civic Mathematics course working collaboratively on hands-on activities. What she saw there was inspiring.
“They were really talking to each other and sharing their knowledge from different courses outside of the one we were in,” she says. “They brought some of that knowledge into the project they were working on.”
Chris Collins is a biology instructor at NCSSM-Morganton, and taught an Honors Introduction to Neuroscience course during the Online Weekend. He says that the in-person experience has benefits throughout the entirety of the course, even when students have returned home.
“It always exceeds my expectations in regards to how quickly the students assimilate as a group,” he says. “When they’re actually here in person together, it’s a little more of an engaging emotional experience. That human-to-human connection makes it more personal, more memorable, and it motivates them a little more.That resonates with those students for the rest of the online course.”
Dylan Robinson, a senior from Forsyth Country Day School in Winston-Salem, has attended NCSSM Online Weekend on both campuses, first in Durham, and lastly at Morganton. Early in his high school career he considered submitting an application to NCSSM’s Residential program, but realized that he wanted to remain with his family while he finished high school. NCSSM Online was the perfect option for him – “a life-changing experience” in fact – allowing him to blend two things he loves: his home community, and engineering.
“I knew that by my senior year I was going to run out of engineering courses offered at my school and that’s something I’m really passionate about,” Dylan says, so it was really great to have the opportunity to continue exploring my interests while staying with my family for a couple more years before I go off to college.”
As with the other seniors in the program, this Online Weekend was the last one for Katherine. Classes will continue virtually, but the next time she returns to campus will be in May when she and the others in the program return to receive their NCSSM Online certificates of completion. And though it’s not quite yet over, she’s already thinking about all that she has gained from the experience.
“I’m really grateful for all the opportunities Science and Math has provided me academically and also the opportunity to engage with such a vibrant learning community,” she says. “All the students that I interact with, whether through Zoom or at the NCSSM Online Weekends, share the same kind of desire to pursue subjects that they’re interested in. I’m really grateful for that, and for all that that community has brought me.”
