15 Free Pre-College Medical Summer Programs for High School Students
A medical pre-college program is an excellent use of your summer if you’re a high schooler committed to a future in medicine. Spending weeks in a working lab, a clinical research setting, or alongside practicing scientists lets you explore firsthand what biomedical careers actually look like day to day. It also gives you the opportunity to build technical skills, learn how research moves from question to data to conclusion, and develop professional relationships with mentors and researchers who can speak to your work in college applications and beyond.
What are the benefits of attending a medical pre-college program?
A medical pre-college program can give you access to labs, clinical settings, and mentorship that go beyond what a standard classroom offers. Depending on the program you choose, you could conduct wet-lab research, contribute to a clinical study, or shadow physicians and researchers in a hospital setting. Free programs, in particular, let you gain this kind of experience without cost being a barrier to participation.
In this blog post, we’ve compiled 15 free pre-college medical summer programs for high school students.
If you’re looking for online summer programs, check out our blog here.
Key takeaways
These programs span cancer biology, genetics, neuroscience, clinical research, biomedical engineering, public health, computational medicine, and OB/GYN research, so students with a wide range of medical interests can find a relevant free summer opportunity.
Several programs offer significant stipends in addition to being free, including Duke STAR ($4,000), IU CTSI SEED/STEM ($4,000), Aspirnaut at Vanderbilt ($2,000 salary plus housing and meals), Winship Cancer Institute ($2,400), and LSU Health Sciences Center ($2,645), making them practical options for students who need to earn during the summer.
Several programs are specifically designed for students from low-income, first-generation, or underrepresented backgrounds, including Stanford SMYSP, Johns Hopkins SARE, UMass Chan HSHCP, and Aspirnaut at Vanderbilt, with eligibility criteria that prioritize equitable access.
Application deadlines begin as early as January (Rockefeller SSRP, Duke STAR, Aspirnaut), with most programs closing between February and March, so students should identify target programs in the fall of their junior year and begin preparing materials immediately.
1. Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program (SIMR)
Location: Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Cost: Free, with need-based stipends available starting at $2,500, depending on family income
Acceptance Rate: Not specified
Dates: June 8 – July 30
Application Deadline: February 21
Eligibility: U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are juniors or seniors currently attending high school in the U.S. and are at least 16 by the program start date
At SIMR, you will choose a science-intensive course to pursue for 8 weeks on campus. The options span immunology, neurobiology, cancer biology, bioengineering, stem cell and regenerative medicine, cardiovascular biology, bioinformatics, and genetics and genomics. Once placed, you’ll be carrying out medically oriented basic research in a working lab under the guidance of Stanford faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate researchers, learning techniques and scientific reasoning that are specific to your track. Lab safety training and a weekly seminar series on science careers and college preparation run alongside the bench work. The program concludes with a poster session where you present your findings to your cohort, family, and the broader Stanford research community.
2. Stanford Medical Youth Science Program (SMYSP)
Location: Stanford University campus, Stanford, CA
Cost: Fully funded
Acceptance rate: Extremely selective, only 24 students are accepted
Dates: June 22 – July 26
Application Deadline: March 23
Eligibility: Current high school juniors who live and attend high school in Northern California and are from low-income and/or first-generation college backgrounds
SMYSP is unique in that, roughly one and a half days each week, you are placed in Stanford Hospital, where you observe and participate in departmental activities, shadow clinical staff, and gain direct exposure to patient care environments. The rest of your time is divided between faculty lectures on medicine and public health, professional development workshops on networking and public speaking, and a college-level group research project focused on public health disparities. Mentorship comes from multiple directions over the five weeks, including medical professionals, faculty, and current college students who share advice on navigating college and health careers. The program also follows a peer teaching model to ensure lateral learning amongst the cohort.
3. Rockefeller University Summer Science Research Program (SSRP)
Location: The Rockefeller University, Manhattan, NY
Cost: Free
Acceptance rate: Extremely selective, only around 32 students per batch
Dates: June 22 – August 6
Application Deadline: January 2
Eligibility: High school juniors or seniors at least 16 years old at program start
SSRP divides its 32 scholars into four research teams of eight to ten students each, with every team led by scientists drawn from Rockefeller, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Weill Cornell Medicine. Similar to teams in a research lab, a lead investigator and additional scientists direct a group of researchers working toward a common goal. Week one covers your team's research area and the techniques you will use, while week two is yours to define a specific question within that framework. Weeks three through five are spent exploring it with close guidance from the scientists. The final two weeks shift toward analyzing results and building a scientific poster for the end-of-program symposium. A core series of lectures from Rockefeller scientists runs in the background throughout to ensure coverage of medical fundamentals.
4. Harvard Medical School Project Success
Location: Harvard Medical School and affiliated research institutions, Boston and Cambridge, MA
Cost: Free, with paid internship opportunities
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 29 – August 14
Application Deadline: February 4
Eligibility: Current high school juniors or seniors residing in Boston or Cambridge, MA, with a GPA of 2.7+, and who have completed algebra, biology, and chemistry
Project Success connects you with a senior scientist or physician at HMS or one of its affiliated research institutions over a seven-week research period. The mentor relationship is the core of the program and encompasses both scientific work and professional guidance. Beyond the lab, the cohort comes together for site visits to hospitals and biotech companies, writing workshops, computer training, and academic seminars with researchers from across the HMS ecosystem. Career counseling is embedded throughout, with access to networking opportunities with participants in other summer programs running in parallel on the HMS campus. The research areas vary widely because the program draws on a large affiliated network, spanning immunology, bioengineering, and related fields.
5. UMass Chan Medical School High School Health Careers Program (HSHCP)
Location: UMass Chan Medical School, Worcester, MA
Cost: Free, with a stipend awarded upon completion
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 28 – July 24
Application Deadline: March 2
Eligibility: Massachusetts residents who are sophomores or juniors in a Massachusetts high school, aged 16 or older. Must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents
HSHCP is a four-week residential program at UMass Chan Medical School that divides each day into three distinct avenues of learning. Morning sessions are academic, covering biology, mathematics, English, communication skills, and information technology. Afternoons are devoted to observer and internship placements at UMass Chan, where you interact directly with physicians, scientists, and other health professionals in clinical and research settings. Late afternoons bring the cohort together for Cultural and Contemporary Health Issues seminars, which approach medicine through the lens of equity and community health. Every participant completes a Health Disparities Research Project over four weeks, resulting in a research product to present at the end.
6. Aspirnaut High School Summer Research Internship
Location: Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN
Cost: Free. Interns receive a $2,000 salary, as well as housing and meals
Acceptance rate: Highly selective; only 15 to 20 students are admitted annually
Dates: May 31 – July 11
Application Deadline: January 14
Eligibility: High school students aged 15+ with a strong academic record in math and science
Over six weeks at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, you’ll work 40 hours a week in a research lab focused on diabetes, cancer, or regenerative biology, attending lab meetings and presenting data alongside your team. Running alongside that research work are ACT/SAT prep sessions, one-on-one college planning meetings with program staff, and luncheons with VUMC faculty and members of the broader scientific community. Evenings and weekends include social activities in Nashville organized by resident counselors. At the end of six weeks, you’ll deliver an oral presentation and a poster about your research. The mentorship, college application advice, and standardized test support continue even after you leave campus.
7. Winship Cancer Institute Summer Scholars Research Program
Location: Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
Cost: No cost; interns are paid a $2,400 stipend upon program completion
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 8 – July 17
Application Deadline: Keep an eye on the program website for details on the next cycle
Eligibility: Rising or graduating high school seniors aged 16+, who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents
Winship covers the range of what cancer research can look like, through wet-lab experiments in cancer biology, clinical data analysis, or community-based public health studies, depending on where you are placed. You will get to work one-on-one with a Winship-affiliated faculty member, and the broader lecture series draws on other Winship researchers who share their active areas of work. Panel discussions with cancer survivors, clinical fellows, and former scholars give you insight into cancer from both the patient and practitioner perspectives. Field trips have taken students to the David J. Sencer CDC Museum and Emory clinical facilities. Presentation skill-building sessions prepare you for the final symposium, where each student delivers both a talk and a poster.
8. Emory University NextGen High School Internship Program
Location: Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA
Cost: No cost; these are paid internships
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 1 – July 8
Application Deadline: February 13
Eligibility: Rising high school juniors or seniors, aged 16+ by June 2
NextGen takes you through multiple labs and clinical settings in Emory's Department of Human Genetics, providing a broad sampling of how genetics research shows up across basic science, clinical medicine, and genetic counseling. Foundational lectures run alongside the rotations, allowing you to build conceptual knowledge while getting hands-on exposure across environments. Field trips to nearby programs and businesses expand the picture further. Activities and mentorship continue into the school year, helping you build strong professional relationships that can benefit your academic career.
9. Duke STAR Program
Location: Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), Durham, NC
Cost: Free | Students earn a $4,000 stipend
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 22 – July 24
Application Deadline: January 2
Eligibility: Rising high school seniors and graduating seniors who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents
The STAR Program allows you to experience the full arc of a clinical research study. Working in a team with faculty from Duke's Clinical Research Institute, you’ll spend the first two weeks developing a specific question about drug use in a pediatric or neonatal population, then proceed to literature review, study design, statistical analysis with support from a Duke biostatistician, and scientific writing with a medical writer. The program culminates with a complete manuscript submitted for peer review at a scientific journal, making co-authorship a realistic outcome. Faculty-led sessions on neonatology, antimicrobial therapy, and pharmacoepidemiology give the research question a broader clinical context, and a medical ethics seminar is also included in the curriculum. Students 18 and older can also shadow Duke physicians on hospital rounds.
10. Johns Hopkins Summer Academic Research Experience (SARE)
Location: Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD
Cost: Free
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 22 – August 13
Application Deadline: March 1
Eligibility: High school students from low-income and first-generation or educationally under-resourced backgrounds in the greater Baltimore area. Students must also meet at least one additional criterion (e.g., first-generation college, attend a predominantly low-income school, or have faced significant household challenges)
At SARE, you’ll devote 70% of your time to working in an active research lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where you’ll contribute to a real, ongoing project under the daily supervision of a doctoral student or postdoctoral fellow. The remaining time covers a mandatory parallel curriculum involving scientific writing, data analysis, mathematics, and bioethics, taught on-site by the SARE instructional team. Some scholars go on to become co-authors on published papers. The full 8 weeks at a research university give you sustained exposure to how a scientific career actually operates, including lab culture, colleague dynamics, and professional expectations.
11. Peter E. Schwartz Discovery to Cure High School Internship
Location: Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
Cost: Free
Acceptance rate: Highly selective; only up to 20 students are admitted
Dates: 6.5 weeks from June through August
Application Deadline: February 13
Eligibility: Rising high school seniors aged 16+
Yale's Discovery to Cure places rising seniors in working biomedical labs across the medical school, spanning departments including oncology, neuroscience, pathology, pediatrics, endocrinology, and biomedical engineering. Your assigned principal investigator shapes your daily work, which includes hands-on experiments and techniques such as gel electrophoresis, RT-PCR, and electron microscopy, all applied to the lab's actual research priorities. Alongside the bench work, you’ll attend a lecture series taught by Yale faculty on current scientific questions across the campus, and panel discussions with cancer survivors will bring a patient-centered perspective.
12. Columbia University DBMI Summer Research Program
Location: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY
Cost: Free to attend
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 29 – August 14
Application Deadline: February 20
Eligibility: Rising high school seniors who are at least 17 years old by June 29, and are located in the New York City metropolitan area
This program gives you access to one of the largest clinical data infrastructures in the world: the OHDSI (Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics) network, which aggregates over 800 million patient records. You’ll work on a faculty-led project currently under active research at Columbia DBMI, which could involve applying machine learning to identify high-risk drug combinations, designing a mobile health study, or analyzing patterns in electronic health records. A mini-course with prerecorded faculty lectures runs alongside the research, weekly lab meetings expose you to how a research team processes findings in real time, and journal clubs build your ability to read and critique published studies. Past participants have even presented their work at the American Medical Informatics Association annual symposium.
13. Baylor College of Medicine OB/GYN Clinical Research Internship
Location: Texas Children's Hospital Pavilion for Women, Houston, TX
Cost: Free
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 22 – July 31
Application Deadline: March 31
Eligibility: Current high school students aged 16+ from the greater Houston area
This program puts you inside the administrative and operational side of clinical research at Texas Children's Hospital Pavilion for Women. You will shadow biobank and clinical trial research coordinators through every stage of their work, from recruiting participants, obtaining informed consent, and maintaining IRB compliance to managing data collection and navigating the regulatory infrastructure that enables clinical studies. Weeks two through five rotate you through outpatient and inpatient research settings, so you see how different types of trials are managed at a working medical institution. Alongside the shadowing, you’ll attend research lectures and workshops on biostatistics, bioinformatics, and good clinical practice, complete CITI certification training in human subjects research ethics, and work on a poster or abstract as a scientific writing exercise.
14. Indiana University CTSI SEED/STEM Summer Program
Location: Indiana University School of Medicine and affiliated research sites, Indianapolis, IN
Cost: Free, with a $4,000 stipend for qualifying students
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 8 – July 30
Application Deadline: March 1
Eligibility: Current Indiana high school sophomores, juniors, or seniors who have completed at least one high school chemistry course
SEED/STEM embeds you in a faculty research lab at one of the Indiana University School of Medicine, Indiana University Indianapolis, or Indiana Bioscience Research Institute campuses, where you spend eight weeks working directly alongside a researcher on an active project. The range of research topics includes biomedical engineering, life sciences, chemistry, medicine, and dentistry and varies depending on the available faculty and your stated interests. You’ll work 40 hours a week at a professional pace and prepare a research poster to present at the end of the program. The program is partnered with the American Chemical Society's Project SEED, which was established to provide sustained research access to students who otherwise wouldn't encounter it.
15. LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans Summer Research Internship
Location: LSU Health Sciences Center, New Orleans, LA
Cost: Free, with a $2,645 stipend paid in three installments during the program
Acceptance rate: Not specified
Dates: June 1 – July 24
Application Deadline: February 16
Eligibility: High school juniors or seniors, aged 16–18
The program pairs you with a faculty mentor at LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans and has you working on an active research project for eight weeks. Each student's project is determined by the mentor's current area of work, which spans a range of basic and clinical science fields at the medical school. In addition to the daily lab or clinical research work, you will attend a weekly seminar series that introduces you to different areas of medical and basic research at LSHSC, broadening your exposure beyond your specific placement. The program concludes with a poster symposium where you present your summer research to peers, faculty, and program staff.
Frequently asked questions
1. What free pre-college medical summer programs are available for high school students?
Options include university research programs, such as SIMR at Stanford, Rockefeller SSRP, Harvard Medical School Project Success, and Yale Discovery to Cure, cancer-focused programs, such as Winship Cancer Institute and Duke STAR, clinical research programs, such as Columbia DBMI, Baylor OB/GYN Clinical Research, and Johns Hopkins SARE, and regionally based programs, such as UMass Chan HSHCP, Emory NextGen, and LSU Health Sciences Center.
2. Which free medical summer programs offer the largest stipends for high school students?
Duke STAR and IU CTSI SEED/STEM each offer $4,000 stipends. Aspirnaut at Vanderbilt provides a $2,000 salary plus free housing and meals. LSU Health Sciences Center offers $2,645, Winship Cancer Institute offers $2,400, Stanford SIMR offers need-based stipends starting at $2,500, and UMass Chan HSHCP awards a stipend upon completion. Harvard Medical School Project Success also offers paid internship opportunities.
3. Which programs prioritize students from low-income or first-generation backgrounds?
Stanford SMYSP is specifically designed for low-income and first-generation Northern California students. Johns Hopkins SARE targets students from low-income and educationally under-resourced backgrounds. UMass Chan HSHCP prioritizes Massachusetts residents meeting financial criteria, and Aspirnaut at Vanderbilt is built to serve students from rural and underrepresented communities. IU CTSI SEED/STEM is partnered with the American Chemical Society's Project SEED, which was created to expand research access for underserved students.
4. When should I apply to free pre-college medical summer programs for high school students?
The earliest deadlines are Rockefeller SSRP and Duke STAR (January 2), followed by Aspirnaut at Vanderbilt (January 14) and Harvard Medical School Project Success (February 4). Most programs close in February or March, including SIMR at Stanford (February 21), LSU Health Sciences Center (February 16), and Johns Hopkins SARE (March 1). Students should begin identifying programs and requesting recommendations in the fall of their junior year.
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