WENATCHEE — Instead of taking the WASL Thursday, Wenatchee freshmen extracted DNA out of strawberries. They exploded balloons with liquid nitrogen. They watched ordinary oil seeds glow florescent red under a special light and filter.

This is the stuff that makes college look cool. A traveling team of college professors took over classes at Wenatchee High School as part of their “Imagine U @ WSU” tour Thursday. They will teach classes at Bridgeport and Othello high schools today.

Every freshman had two admission tickets and a list of 21 careers to choose from.

In “Chemistry & Color,” Crash Ketcham, 14, dotted a piece of paper with color marker, soaked the paper in solution and watched the colors separate up the page into primary colors — green to blue and yellow. It’s a method called chromatography, which chemists use to identify the makeup of a liquid compound.

This wasn’t Ketchum’s idea of college chemistry. He imagined a chalk board and some old guy in a white lab coat, he said.

“I’m really interested in knowing how stuff works and what things are made of,” Ketcham said. “Like if you took something you see every day, like a color, and translate that into a formula.”

The goal behind the workshops is recruitment, not just to WSU, but to college in general, said chemistry professor Jeremy Lessmann. About two-thirds of the workshops were for math and science majors.

“We want to make sure we get more students interested in science,” said chemistry professor Jeremy Lessmann. “Science majors are also the toughest. A lot of students look at the list of requirements — especially the math involved — and they’re turned off. We’re trying to help them see beyond the numbers.”

Next door, professor Mary Guenther helped students find the physics of common toys and showed them what happens when you freeze a racquetball in liquid nitrogen. Her workshop was a whirlwind tour of the “ologies” — biology, physiology, neurology. She challenged her two classes to use the scientific method — research, hypothesize, experiment — to find their college path.

“I’m a different face and a different voice,” Guenther said. “Their teachers are probably saying the same thing I am. How many times do you have to hear something before you start believing?”

Rachel Schleif: 664-7139

schleif@wenatcheeworld.com