15 AI Summer Pre-College Programs for High School Students
If you're a high school student serious about AI, a dedicated summer program is one of the most direct ways to build real technical skills before college. These programs place you in university labs and classrooms, where you work alongside faculty researchers, graduate students, and peers who share your interests. You'll gain experience with current tools and methods, such as Python, machine learning algorithms, neural networks, and data analysis, and apply them to various problems. Many programs also connect you with working professionals in the field through industry visits, guest lectures, and mentorship, which gives you a clearer picture of what a career in AI can look like.
What are the benefits of attending an AI pre-college program?
Attending an AI pre-college program gives you the chance to work on projects that can teach you fundamentals currently relevant to the industry. Depending on the program, you might train a machine learning model on clinical health data, build a generative AI application, analyze datasets to answer a research question, or develop an AI-powered solution to a problem you define yourself. Some programs also take you into policy and governance territory, exploring how AI is regulated and debated at an institutional level. The combination of technical coursework, group projects, and exposure to university research culture tends to sharpen both your skills and your sense of what direction you want to pursue.
To help you find the right fit, we've put together a list of 15 AI summer pre-college programs for high school students.
If you’re looking for online summer programs, check out our blog here.
Key takeaways
These 15 programs span university campuses, including MIT, Stanford, CMU, Princeton, Columbia, and Georgetown, as well as virtual formats, such as Veritas AI and Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes, giving students options regardless of location.
Several programs are free, including MIT Beaver Works, CMU AI Scholars, Princeton AI4ALL, MITES Summer, and Columbia DBMI, while others offer need-based financial aid to offset tuition costs.
Programs range from one-week intensives, such as MIT Jameel Clinic and Georgetown AI Academy, to six-week residential experiences, such as MITES Summer, so students can choose based on their availability and depth of interest.
Many programs require no prior programming or AI experience, including Princeton AI4ALL, Stanford AI4ALL, and UC Berkeley BeSMART, making them accessible to students who are exploring the field for the first time.
Application deadlines for the most selective programs fall early, including Georgetown AI Academy (January 31 early bird), CMU AI Scholars (February 1), and Stanford AI4ALL (February 6), so students should begin preparing materials in the fall.
1. MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute
Location: MIT Campus, Cambridge, MA, or virtual
Cost: Free for families earning under $200,000/year
Acceptance Rate / Cohort Size: Not specified
Dates: 4-week summer programs
Application Deadline: March 30
Eligibility: Rising high school seniors who live or attend high school in the U.S.
BWSI offers three AI-focused tracks that you can apply to separately: CogWorks walks you through machine learning applied to audio, vision, and language, with team capstone projects in each domain, and requires you to produce the underlying algorithm in Python yourself. Medlytics puts you to work on real clinical datasets: predicting hypothyroidism, classifying sleep stages from physiological signals, detecting cancer in mammography images using decision trees, SVMs, and convolutional neural networks. Serious Games with AI has you modifying a provided game to investigate a research question your group defines, across topics such as disease-spread modeling and autonomous decision-making in morally complex environments. All three tracks run for four weeks and require you to complete a self-directed online prerequisite course before the summer begins.
2. Carnegie Mellon University — AI Scholars
Location: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Cost: Free
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 20 – July 18
Application deadline: February 1
Eligibility: Rising 11th graders aged 16+ who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents
AI Scholars is a four-week residential program taught by CMU faculty, covering foundational computing and AI concepts through a college-level curriculum. You'll complete a virtual Python preparation course before arriving on campus, then move into daily coursework, group research projects, and faculty-led lectures once you're there. The group projects run throughout the program and culminate in a public capstone symposium where every team presents their work. Alongside the technical curriculum, weekly college prep seminars cover admissions, financial aid, essay writing, and academic readiness. There are even field trips to tech companies that let you talk with working engineers and researchers about how AI gets deployed outside of a university setting.
3. Princeton AI4ALL
Location: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate: Not specified
Dates: The previous cycle was from July 9 – 30. Keep an eye on the website for details
Application Deadline: The previous deadline was April 9. Keep an eye on the program website
Eligibility: Rising 11th graders living in the U.S. or Puerto Rico who either have a household income under $60,000, or are eligible for free/reduced price lunch in high school
Princeton AI4ALL is a three-week residential program in which you attend lectures from Princeton AI faculty, get introduced to ongoing research projects in Princeton's AI labs, and then work in a small group led by a Princeton graduate student to apply a real AI model to an actual dataset. Past groups have used NLP to detect fake news and computer vision to analyze biodiversity and medical imaging data. A two-day field trip to Washington, D.C. is also a part of the program, wherein you meet with policymakers and visit organizations working on AI governance and regulation. Mentoring sessions with AI faculty and senior researchers, along with career development workshops, run throughout the three weeks.
4. MITES Summer
Location: MIT Campus, Cambridge, MA
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate: Not specified
Dates: 6 weeks from late June through early August
Application Deadline: February 15
Eligibility: High school juniors who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents
MITES Summer is six weeks on MIT's campus and runs at roughly a college pace. You will take courses in math, life sciences, physics, and humanities, plus one project-based elective; Machine Learning is among the elective options. Placement into the core courses is based on a knowledge inventory during orientation. Midterms run in week three, final projects and presentations in weeks five and six, and finals close out week six. At the end, each instructor writes a qualitative evaluation of your work and growth, which you can include with your college applications. Lab tours, a college fair with admissions officers from selective institutions, and seminars with STEM professionals run throughout the program alongside the coursework.
5. Cornell Tech Summer Innovation Intensives
Location: Cornell Tech campus, Roosevelt Island, New York, NY
Cost: $6,500
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: July 13 – 30
Application deadline: Rolling from February onward
Eligibility: Rising high school juniors, seniors, and graduating seniors from the NYC metro area, ages 15–19
At Summer Innovation Intensives, you’ll select one of three tracks for the morning sessions. Engineering Operations teaches you the algorithms and data science behind real-world optimization problems like routing, matching, and resource allocation. Interacting with AI examines how AI affects human behavior, communication, and online communities, and Ethical Vibe Coding has you build apps with AI tools while working through questions of bias and design responsibility. Every afternoon, all tracks converge in Future Builders Studio, where you learn to identify a real problem, design a solution that integrates AI, prototype it, and pitch it at a final showcase on the Roosevelt Island campus. You earn two Cornell University credits upon completion.
6. Stanford AI4ALL
Location: Virtual or residential at Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Cost: $4,120 for online, $9,800 for residential. Financial aid is available.
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 15 – 26 (online) or July 19 – 31 (residential)
Application Deadline: February 6
Eligibility: Current 9th-graders and rising 10th-graders aged 14 and older.
At Stanford’s variant of AI4ALL, you can choose between one of four research tracks when you apply: Computer Vision, Medical AI, NLP, or Robotics. Within that track, you work in a small team on a hands-on research project led by Stanford graduate students and postdocs, with daily lectures from Stanford CS and AI faculty providing the technical grounding. The curriculum connects the work you're doing in your research group to applied questions in healthcare, disaster response, and poverty reduction. As AI4ALL requires no prior programming or AI experience, it is a strong option if you’re looking for an introductory offering attached to the prestige of an Ivy League university.
7. Columbia DBMI Summer Research Program
Location: Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York, NY
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate: Highly selective; NYC-area high school students form a small share of a cohort that includes undergraduates
Dates: June 29 – August 14
Application Deadline: February 20
Eligibility: Rising high school seniors and recent high school graduates (17+) located in the NYC metropolitan area
Over seven weeks at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, you will work on a research project currently being run by DBMI faculty and graduate students. A mini-course on how informatics improves healthcare outcomes runs alongside the research, and weekly lab meetings show you how a research group actually operates week to week. Journal clubs put you in front of your peers to present and discuss recently published papers, and you'll also design an independent study proposal using OHDSI, a clinical data warehouse covering more than 800 million patient records. Past participants have presented work derived from this program at professional conferences, including AMIA.
8. MIT Jameel Clinic — AI & Health Summer High School Bootcamp
Location: MIT campus, Cambridge, MA
Cost: $2,000
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: July 13 – 17
Application deadline: March 1
Eligibility: High school students in grades 10–12
Over one week on MIT's campus, you take four courses: an introduction to AI and machine learning in healthcare, a Python programming course split by skill level, a clinical AI course covering how AI tools function inside hospitals and the risks involved in deploying them, and a drug discovery course on how AI is being used to reduce the time and cost of pharmaceutical development. Group projects run across the week and end in a final presentation evaluated by the instructors. The faculty teaching these courses are active researcher-clinicians with strong academic backgrounds, allowing you to benefit from their mentorship. Compared to the other options on this list, this is a shorter program requiring a lower time commitment, but it still offers sufficient exposure to be a meaningful option.
9. ESAP Penn’s Artificial Intelligence track
Location: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Cost: $9,250
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: July 12 – 31
Application deadline: February 28
Eligibility: Rising 10th–12th graders with a minimum 3.0 GPA
ESAP's AI course covers generative AI, neural networks, and the underlying mathematics over three weeks, through both lectures and daily lab sessions. The lab time has you apply the theory you’ve been taught, working through problems, debugging, and building toward a final project in which you design and implement a custom AI application. Precalculus is strongly recommended for this course, but not required. Penn faculty researchers lead the course at a pace and with expectations modeled on a college course, and the final week of the program includes a project showcase.
10. Machine Learning Summer Program
Location: NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY
Cost: $3,180
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 15 – 27, July 6 – 17, or July 20 – 31
Application deadline: April 17 for Session 1, May 1 for Sessions 2 and 3
Eligibility: Current 9th–12th graders who have completed precalculus and have some programming experience in any language
This two-week program covers the computer science, mathematics, and data analysis behind machine learning, applied to systems such as image recognition, voice control, autonomous vehicles, and medical diagnostics. You'll build and validate models, work with neural networks, and practice moving from theoretical concepts to working code in Python. The course is led by Tandon ECE faculty with experience in deep learning and privacy-preserving computation, with at least one graduate student instructor in every session. The small batch sizes ensure high-quality mentorship, in addition to the classroom learning itself.
11. UC Berkeley BeSMART
Location: UC Berkeley Campus, Berkeley, CA
Cost: $7,000
Acceptance Rate: Highly selective; only 20 students are admitted per batch
Dates: July 27 – August 7
Application Deadline: March 31
Eligibility: High school students ages 15–17
BeSMART is a two-week residential program from Berkeley's IEOR department that introduces high school students to machine learning and data-driven research, with no prior programming experience required. You'll cover Python fundamentals, data manipulation, and the core algorithms behind modern AI, then apply them to a final research project on a topic you choose. Six IEOR faculty members teach this small-batch program, providing exposure and mentorship unmatched by similar offerings. The schedule also includes college preparation sessions and visits to Silicon Valley companies alongside the technical curriculum.
12. Tufts University’s Engineering with Artificial Intelligence
Location: Tufts University, Medford/Somerville Campus, MA
Cost: $4,425 for commuter, $5,950 for residential
Acceptance Rate: Not specified
Dates: July 5 – 17 or July 19 – 31
Application Deadline: May 1
Eligibility: Rising sophomores through seniors or graduating seniors who have prior programming knowledge
The first week grounds you in the history and mathematics of AI and ML, then moves through subfields from basic machine learning algorithms to higher-level platforms, with daily hands-on challenges and guest speakers from Tufts faculty and industry partners. The second week shifts to a group engineering design project in which you pick a real-world problem, research its constraints, design a technical solution, prototype it, and test it, finishing with a public video presentation of your working prototype. The program is led and taught by Tufts faculty working in AI and natural language processing, and its advanced curriculum requires prior programming experience in Python or another language that covers variables, loops, functions, and data structures.
13. UCLA CSSI — AI / Generative AI Tracks
Location: UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, Los Angeles, CA
Cost: $3,150 ($3,821 if you want course credit)
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: AI/Data Science track: June 22 to July 10; Generative AI track: July 13–31
Application deadline: April 30 (AI/Data Science track); June 1 (Generative AI track)
Eligibility: High school students in grades 10–12 with a minimum 3.5 GPA, at least 15 by June 22
CSSI is a rigorous three-week pre-college program that offers multiple options for high school students who are serious about computer science and AI, regardless of their prior exposure. Intro to AI covers the statistical and computational foundations of machine learning, including model building, data analysis, and the principles behind prediction systems, and is taught by UCLA faculty, with active PhD students leading the discussion sections. Generative AI is a more advanced course taught by UCLA faculty and covers how large generative models are trained, what multimodal learning looks like in practice, and current open problems in reasoning. Track 3 recommends that you either have completed Track 2 or have an equivalent background, along with experience in AP Statistics, Calculus, and Python.
14. Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes — Artificial Intelligence
Location: Online
Cost: $3,200
Acceptance Rate: Not specified
Dates: June 15 – 26 or July 6 – 17
Application Deadline: March 13
Eligibility: Current grades 10–11 for the AI course, grades 9–11 for the Philosophy of AI course
This two-week online program covers supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning with a focus on understanding how each approach works mathematically. You'll apply linear algebra, statistics, calculus, and optimization as tools, implement algorithms in Python using both pedagogical and real-world datasets, and analyze how bias enters data and models, and what mitigation entails technically. Unlike many other virtual programs, this program is synchronous, with live sessions with Stanford-affiliated instructors in small discussion-based classes.
15. Georgetown University’s Artificial Intelligence Academy
Location: Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
Cost: $3,095 for commuter, $3,725 for residential
Acceptance Rate: Not specified
Dates: June 7 – 13
Application Deadline: January 31 for early bird, May 15 for final
Eligibility: High school students ages 15 and older, with at least a 2.0 GPA
Over one week in Washington D.C., you work through AI from four angles: the science of how current systems work and where the field is heading, the ethics of responsible development drawing on both Western and non-Western frameworks, the regulatory regimes different governments are putting in place, and the geopolitics of AI as a technology driving economic competition. You'll test simple AI models yourself, analyze real use cases across industries, and work through a capstone project each evening applying what you've learned to a specific area of your choosing. Off-site visits to D.C. institutions connect the policy content to the actual organizations that produce and regulate it. The program is led by faculty from Georgetown's Applied Intelligence Program, and culminates in a policy or design proposal addressing a relevant topic of your choosing.
Frequently asked questions
1. What are the best AI summer programs for high school students?
Strong options depend on a student's goals and experience level. Students new to AI might consider Princeton AI4ALL, Stanford AI4ALL, or UC Berkeley BeSMART, while those with prior programming experience might look at MIT Beaver Works, Tufts University's Engineering with AI, or Columbia DBMI's Summer Research Program.
2. Are there free AI summer programs for high school students?
Yes, several programs are free, including MIT Beaver Works (for families earning under $200,000), CMU AI Scholars, Princeton AI4ALL, MITES Summer, and Columbia DBMI Summer Research Program. Stanford AI4ALL and others offer need-based financial aid to reduce costs.
3. Which AI summer programs accept students with no prior experience?
Princeton AI4ALL, Stanford AI4ALL, and UC Berkeley BeSMART explicitly require no prior programming or AI experience. MIT Jameel Clinic and Georgetown AI Academy are also accessible to students earlier in their technical journey, provided they meet the grade and GPA requirements.
4. What topics do AI summer programs for high school students cover?
Topics vary by program but commonly include machine learning fundamentals, neural networks, Python programming, computer vision, natural language processing, and data analysis. Some programs, such as Princeton AI4ALL and Georgetown AI Academy, also cover AI ethics, governance, and policy alongside the technical curriculum.
5. Do any AI summer programs lead to publications or college credit?
Yes, Veritas AI supports students in publishing their work in high school research journals through an in-house publication team. Cornell Tech Summer Innovation Intensives awards two Cornell University credits upon completion, and UCLA CSSI offers an optional credit add-on for an additional fee.
6. When should I apply to AI summer programs for high school students?
Several programs have early deadlines, including Georgetown AI Academy (January 31), CMU AI Scholars (February 1), Stanford AI4ALL (February 6), and Columbia DBMI (February 20). Others, such as Tufts University (May 1) and UCLA CSSI Generative AI track (June 1), allow more time, but students should begin researching options in the fall to stay on track.
If you're looking to build a project/research paper in the field of AI & ML, consider applying to Veritas AI!
With Veritas AI, which was founded by Harvard graduate students, you can work 1-on-1 with mentors from universities like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and more to create unique, personalized projects. In the past year, we had over 1000 students learn AI & ML with us. Check out a past student's experience in the program here. You can apply here!