SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- SUNY ESF held its annual Environmental Summit on Thursday. High school students from around the area have been taking part in a program called ESF in the High School, which allows students to take college level courses.

Students in the Global Environment course were at the summit to present their hypotheses on a variety of environmental topics such as solar and renewable energy. The program allows high school students to get a better feel for the amount of work that college courses require and at the same time, it makes them more environmentally aware.

"Originally, I think when we started this in January, we thought it would be really easy, but unfortunately, it's not. There's a lot more work that goes into it and there's a lot of planning and experiment design that you really have to deal with. And then there's a lot of trouble shooting. You start to run your experiments and then you get through it and you have to work out the bugs," said Jake O'Connell, a senior at the Institute of Technology at Syracuse Central.

The Environmental Summit had participants from 13 schools delivering dozens of oral and poster presentations.