Mission

To inspire a life-long love of learning through enrichment programs that stimulate intellectual promise, awaken individual creativity, and foster academic achievement.

The Big Idea

The Lyceum of Monterey County has been offering educational opportunities to Monterey County students for more than 60 years. We run annual educational programs, including Mock Trial, Model United Nations, Expanding Your Horizons STEM Conference and Career Fair, History Day and Spelling Bee. These programs offer unique opportunities for participants to do in-depth research throughout the year, and they culminate in conferences and competitions where students get to showcase what they’ve learned.
Programs like Mock Trial and Model UN provide unique life-skills enrichment that gives students valuable experiences that they can draw on throughout their lives. These programs are instrumental to students and help many find career paths, gaining confidence in fields they may not have previously seen themselves doing. They provide incredible peer-learning opportunities and inter-school socialization and camaraderie, as they meet and work with students from many different backgrounds but with whom they share similar interests.

The Lyceum has been the gateway to countless experiences throughout my high school career, specifically through its annual county Mock Trial competition. The experience of standing before a real judge at counsel’s table, a blank legal pad before me and months worth of arguments buzzing around my mind was unrivaled by any challenges I had faced before. This competition allowed my team to present trials in a terrifyingly realistic setting—in which we learned more than months of classroom practice could ever teach us. In addition to the competition itself, getting to compete in the Monterey County Courthouse introduced me to judges and attorneys I have since reached out to and even interned with. Without the Lyceum, none of this would have been possible not only for Carmel High School’s mock trial program, but for my own developing interest in the law and future legal studies.

- Shayla Dutta