Apprentice

guide

When do high school students apply to summer research?

Most selective summer research programs for high school students open applications in the fall and close in the winter, long before the summer they happen. If you start looking in the spring, you are often looking at programs that have already closed. The exact day changes every year, so this page names the season and points you to each program's own page.

Students doing field research in a creek

Start the school year before, not the month before

A useful calendar is the school year before the summer you want. Fall is when many applications open. Winter is when many of them close. May is a late time to discover that a program you wanted ended its application months earlier.

This page will not print a date. Programs move their windows, and a copied date becomes wrong. Use the program's own page for the year you mean.

What is worth preparing before a form opens

Before a form exists, you can still get ready. Ask a teacher or mentor who has seen your work whether they can write for you later. Request a school record early enough that you are not waiting on an office in the last week. Write a few sentences about a project, class, or activity you actually did.

Programs do not ask for the same materials. Read the program page before you draft. A specific piece of work is more useful than a general essay about liking science.

Three programs that are not the same kind of summer

Research Science Institute, run by the Center for Excellence in Education, is a residential summer research program. MITES, at MIT, is a structured science and engineering program that has included both a summer and a school-year format. The NIH Summer Internship Program is a research internship inside the agency. They are examples, not a ranking, and they are not the whole list.

Who can apply is different for each one and changes. The NIH page, in particular, is the authority on whether high school students can apply in a given year. This guide does not copy those rules.

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