What Makes a Great Summer Program? What Students Remember

It's easy to get caught up in prestigious names, selectivity and rankings when evaluating summer programs. Many top universities now offer pre-college programs, alongside organizations with long-standing reputations. But the best-known name doesn't necessarily translate into the best student experience.

From the students we've talked to about their summer experiences, we haven't always found a correlation between the prestige or selectivity of a program and how highly they valued the experience.

For instance, we've seen a wide range of AI programs. In some, students were given a goal and the freedom to figure out how to reach it, building their own solutions and learning from challenges and mistakes along the way. Working as a team toward a final milestone gave them real ownership of what they created. In other programs, much of the work involved reproducing existing code, leaving considerably less room for experimentation and problem-solving. The experiences with greater student ownership tended to be much more memorable.

One of the biggest highlights in our family came from a program that wasn't particularly selective or attached to a prestigious name. What it offered instead was a combination of deep learning, community service that allowed students to immediately apply what they were learning, and an exceptional group of counselors and participants. The combination made the experience much richer than its name or selectivity might have suggested, and created memories and stories the student will be genuinely excited to share for years to come.

When selecting a summer program, look beyond the name and ask what the experience itself is likely to offer. How much will the student learn? Will they have opportunities to apply what they've learned? How much ownership will they have over their work? Will they meet people who share their interests? Will they come home excited to tell you about what they did?

And if college applications are part of the consideration, there is a nice side benefit: the experiences students find genuinely engaging often give them the most to talk about later. They may spark a new interest, lead to a subsequent project, or simply give the student a story they can tell with genuine enthusiasm. Rather than choosing a program because its name might look impressive on an application, focus on finding an experience worth having. The compelling application story may follow naturally.