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Ask Slashdot: Tech-Related Summer Camps For Teenagers?
First time accepted submitter jcreus writes "I am a teenager (aged 14, though turning 15 before summer), and I've recently been looking for summer camps in the USA. My interests include physics, mathematics (to a lesser extent) and computer science (I already know several programming languages). However, I haven't been able to find anything really exciting. The difficulties I've found include the fact that most are general-oriented, whereas I'm seeking something specific. Furthermore, some are USA-student-only (and I'm European), and most computer-science oriented camps seem to be for non-programmers. What are your experiences with such camps?"
There are just too many people in those places.
space camp! run by NASA.
Our eldest is going to one of the NASA Space camps later this year. It's costing us a bit in airfares and suchlike, but she expects it will be worth it.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Forget the camp. Just let them get a summer job programming. That's what I did. But maybe that's harder to do than it was in 1981...
You might want to look into something like this or this .
My daughter took one out of this one, specifically one on Physics. She loved it and we plan to do another. My other daughter is looking forward to this one.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe. What are you going to want to do next summer, go to summer camp in North Korea?
I think this kid would like to broaden his horizons. I don't think this would be a negative experience overall, as a youth I attended a summer camp located on the border between Canada and the US, besides North Americans, there were a number of other nationalities. It made for a more interesting experience.
I think this sort of thing should be encouraged, it not only will benefit him, but the other campers will benefit being exposed to his culture.
Not useful for the original poster, but Ohio high school students can apply for a two week camp at the Ohio Supercomputing Center (http://www.osc.edu/education/si/). I went a few years ago and really enjoyed it. Most students don't get an opportunity to do massively parallel programming across thousands of processors.
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe.
Maybe he wants to defect from Communist Europe.
If you're open to considering locations in Canada, then Shad Valley is a great program that a lot of my friends have gone to. It's hosted by a university in Canada and is well suited for someone interested in tech. I'd recommend the University of Waterloo location as it probably provides the best exposure to the tech companies in Canada.
"Knowledge makes us accountable." - Che Guevara
In the mid-1990s, I went to a Civil Engineering "summer camp" as a 8th grader (about 14) at Michigan Technological University. It was mostly geared towards fun applications of things and not the math/calculation part of it. Unfortunately, as you've found out, many programs are going to be pretty lightweight.
However, John Hopkins University has put together a decent list of summer programs for people about your age. http://cty.jhu.edu/imagine/linka4.htm
Many of them don't require US citizenship because they aren't funded by USgovernment money. The Penn Summer Science Academy has a set for Experimental Physics which could be interesting.
My best advice would be to email the contact people and explain what you are looking for, focusing on what your experience is and your desired challenge level. Ask them if they think their program would be a good fit.
I am a teenager (aged 14, though turning 15 before summer), and I've recently been looking for summer camps in the USA
Also, your advice is completely worthless since this student specifically mentions they are less interested in learning to program than they are in learning about math and physics.
P.S. Do you happen to work in my IT department? Your writing style feels oddly familiar for some reason...
If you want to do just one course for three weeks, find out if you're eligible for CTY, which does do an international talent search, though you may be too late for Summer 2012
Center for Talented Youth is a programme that runs camps at various universities in the US.
There is one in Dublin Ireland that might be an option for you.
At your age it would be far more healthy, and a far better use of your time, to seek out an opportunity to get laid.
I'm only half joking here. You'll probably continue to enjoy your hobby, and perhaps turn it into a career, regardless of yet another nerd fest. You'll have plenty of opportunities to attend LAN parties, and other socially inept gatherings, later in life. By most definitions I suppose I'm a geek, given my professional and amateur interests; but I've never regretted the stupid, wonderful, awkward, outrageous things I did in my teens. If you insist on a structured Summer, at least choose something that takes you outside your narrow comfort zone. Fuck your interests - they won't bring a smile to your face in twenty years time.
Thanks! I had looked at it before -- and certainly I'd love to join it. It has the added value of Python programming. However, it seems I'm not eligible this year (probably next year or the other).
It's really too bad that it no longer exists, but back when I was in high school (71-74), there was a great National Science Foundation program. The program invited science-oriented HS kids for 2-4 weeks (?) to programs on college campuses. It was like summer camp, but educational.
I went to a chemistry program at University of North Dakota and a electrical engineering one at University of Southern California. The programs were relatively inexpensive and there was scholarship money available to offset tuition and meals.
This was back in the days of the cold war and flush science spending. I'm sure a number of graduates of these programs went onward to great science & engineering achievements.
I'd bet that a number of older /. readers participated in these programs -- don't know when they were discontinued.
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe. What are you going to want to do next summer, go to summer camp in North Korea?
To learn about the USA, and make up his own mind. Then he can return to Europe, and be pleased with what he has, but see what should be improved.
(I visited the USA when I was 14, with my parents. We did a massive 8000km road trip. This is said so often by Europeans that it's a cliché: it was a great place to visit, but I don't want to live there.)
As much as he's been marred for his personal mishaps, Tiger Woods has set up Learning Centers in LA, DC, and a couple of other locations that focus on teaching STEM type curriculum, while providing some physical activity to break up any academic tedium (exercise is good for the mind). I have no accounts of the quality, however it is an option to be explored. www.tigerwoodsfoundation.org
I might be completely off-base here but, at 14, It seems that you already spend more than fair share of your time on these "tech" pursuits (you already know a lot of programming languages and have interests in physics and math). I have been on that path before - pursuing purely tech/geek oriented tasks and activities. My suggestion is to go for something that's completely tangential to your personality, something out of your comfort zone - it'll expand your horizons and challenge you in a way that'll continue to benefit you throughout your life. I would highly recommend ballroom dancing (or salsa for that matter) - it's a highly social activity, you interact a lot with the members of opposite sex and you learn dancing too [trust me, it comes in handy when going out clubbing in college :D]. Other options include painting and learning a new musical instrument.
Stanford has their EPGY program..I did it last year and it was really good. They have a bunch of Math/Physics courses and some CS stuff. http://epgy.stanford.edu/summer/index.html
I'd suggest Wolfram Summer school, http://www.wolframscience.com/summerschool/2012/ It is math-oriented programming, in Mathematica. I have not gone there myself, but Mathematica is a quite nice language. However, Stephen Wolfram is sort of strange, being obsessed by cellular automatas and all that, but otherwise, my guess is that it is a nice school.
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe.
Fascism is always about to descend upon the US, but somehow always lands in Europe...
When I was younger, during the summers between junior high and high school, I used to go to iD tech camps. I went to the one on the Stanford campus specifically. While there, I got to meet other kids interested in the same things as myself, and I got to go through some short, week long programming language crash courses. If I remember correctly, iD taught me Java, C++, and C#. They had other courses besides programming, such as video editting, and web page design. It was a lot of fun and I would definitely recommend it to others!
hey!
I'll never forget my first programming job working for Fluent Technologies. Nice people who were amazed how much of VB6 I already knew, and helped me fill out my range with that technology.
In the summer of '87, just before I graduated high school, I was among a small group of students chosen to spend a week in a computer science summer camp run by Stuart Reges at Stanford. The lectures were all across the board, a smattering of a lot of stuff. We had a lab of Mac 512Ke computers (and a Mac Plus fileserver) on which we learned the basics of Lisp, and there was a networking lecture which posed the Two Generals' Problem, and a lecture on artificial intelligence gave us the Muddy Children Puzzle, and we got to learn Emacs on the school's VAX running VMS, and we got a glimpse of X windows running on a Sun workstation, and I remember a night in an auditorium where we got to see an Amiga use its 4096-color palette to display photorealistic images!
But the most important thing I learned that week - the thing that I've carried with me all the years since then - is that there are *other people like me*. I was a geek in an athletic high school. I was the kid who got beat up and picked on. I was told I had no future because I spent my free time disassembling Apple II games and figuring out how they worked instead of kicking a football. And I believed it - until the day I arrived at that Stanford camp and found other kids who did this sort of stuff, and built robots at home, and memorized pi to a hundred digits, and knew magic tricks, and had a whole bunch of other neat things in their heads which today seem stereotypically nerdy but, back then, the important thing is that none of them involved kicking a football, and these kids were *proud* of who they were and what they could do.
It was only a week. I could say that week changed my life, but it would be more accurate to say that, without it, I might not be here today.
New Mexico Tech has a set of summer camps. nmt.edu
They're all engineering/science/computer related. I'd chuck my kids off there, if I had them, without any reservations.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
When I was in high school, I was lucky to get a summer job at IBM doing internal Linux support in one of their software divisions. I learned a lot, enjoyed my work, and made some industry contacts. At the time, it was pretty sweet to make some money as well. So if you want something a little more intensive and specific than a general science camp, maybe an internship would be a good fit.
As I said, I got kind of lucky with this -- my high school CS teacher knew someone -- but if you just take some initiative and start emailing people, you might be surprised at the results.
Yeah. Go hike around the Alps or something. As the years roll by, you'll look back on that sort of experience more fondly than a summer spent coding.
Ask Dmitry Sklyrov about that. He barely made it out of here without going to prison for his programming activities.
you just have to find the right one (possibly not an easy process). I attended Engineering State at Utah State University and had a lot of fun. It helped me decide between computer engineering and electrical engineering. http://www.engineering.usu.edu/htm/engineering-news/e-state
It's slightly off-topic, so pardon this, but many of the Slashdot readers are also atheists, freethinkers, etc.
There is an international network of summer camps called Camp Quest (www.CampQuest.org), and they teach about science, peer review, skepticism, evolution... plus all your traditional camp activities like hiking, arts and crafts, campfires, etc.
There's about a dozen locations in the US, including two in California, plus three overseas.
-David
Hi - I can very honestly recommend Petnica research center in Serbia to all high school kids (from anywhere in the world). They specialize and focus on working with talented kids on advanced material. Teachers are typically University profs.postdocs and grad. students. I went there half dozen of times myself, and after that to Caltech. I work in Bay area now.
At that age I remember having a great time at summer computer camp in Vermont (2 weeks sleep away) in the early/mid 80's. I had the best time doing the non-computer things (like sailing on Lake Champlain), but I always did as many computer related activities/classes as I could. We got to use the newest Commodore CBM with Pascal! As an advanced class I also learned Fortran on the big IBM (System/34 I think). I don't use the old programming languages any more, but I'm still happy to take out a sail boat!
If you're going to visit the USA I think you should focus on non-computer activities. Like visiting the great national parks, such as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and a hundred others that are unique to America. Spend time programming nearer to home. You can always play with a computer in a windowless closet anywhere!
Just getting out of your hometown, seeing different part of the world, learning what college is like is a great experience. And you may meet nice people too. I did this a couple of summers and found it very rewarding.
I got my first real PC,
so we had a LAN and we tried real hard,
we played games to my eyeballs bled
Beebop was a noob and quit,
TJ Wootie got a girlfriend,
those were the best times of my life,
it was the summer LAN of 69
My honest advice, is to get a fucking life. Seriously, get away from the computer this whole summer and meet new people, socialise, have some fun, do some normal teenage things, drink beer, get laid, go travelling, teach English, whatever. Just stay away from the fucking computer and other geeks and nerds. In twenty years' time, you'll either thank me for this, or regret the day you signed up for summer camp 2012.
When I was 14, the only kind of camp I was interested in was one with hot girls. That isn't going to be a tech camp...
If you end up wanting to go to school here (they give a LOT of financial aid for exchange students), these camps are an easy foot in the door.
I attended the iD tech camp at the University of Minnesota when I was like 10 or 11. It was one of the funnest camps I've ever been to and really sparked my interest in computers and science. I'd recommend them because the iD program is nationwide and all their camps are really fun.
If you have an interest in game development, ProjectFUN at DigiPen, maybe?
https://projectfun.digipen.edu/
Camp Watonka.
http://www.watonka.com/cgi-local/wpage
I am making the assumption that you're male (which I realize may be incorrect); the camp is boys-only. It's a neat place with a very particular subculture. I spent 4 summers there when I was a little younger;. there were the best summers of my teenage life. They are very welcoming of teens from other countries (my last year there we had a guy, Eisa, straight off the plane from Japan. He spoke little English. We spoke zero Japanese. We made it work because that's the kind of kids that are there). It's a family run operation; the Wackers (no jokes; that really is the family name!) are damned nice people. The food is pretty good by camp standards; the instructors and counselors are generally excellent.
Do give it a look. It might be just the mix of things you're looking for.
Chris Knight is my hero.
When I was your age I was in a similar boat. I went to the Hillsdale Science Camp for two or three summers -- I loved it, and can speak very highly for it. Definitely worth checking out!
This is the 21st century. "Computer camp" means getting involved in an open source project from the comfort of your basement.
If you want to come to summer camp in the U.S., by all means do it. You'll have a blast! But if you find aspiring young programmers in camp, it'll be sheer coincidence. Camp isn't where young programmers go to aspire.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Sandusky's judge recommends The Second Mile.
I come here for the love
http://game.unf.dk/index-en.php?language=en
This camp is held every year. Did it 5 years ago - not too shabby.
The premise; create a game from scratch in 3 days, in teams of 5. Really fun.
- Witticism is an epitaph on the death of a feeling
Seriously. Work for an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) this summer.
Better yet, if you're really adventurous (since you're going to be 15), get an internship at CRS4 - a really neat place in Sardinia (Sardegna) about 25 miles from Cagliari. Sardegna is an incredibly beautiful place (I lived there for a few years, but up north in Sassari.)
http://www.crs4.it/
There are probably exchange parents in the area you could stay with.
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In the US we have a concept called "community colleges". They're often more community oriented than a large university and offer many two-year degree programs. Anyway, community college classes can be easier than university classes. I'm not sure if there's something like that in your country, but how about enrolling in a college class in the summer? Most summer semesters are much shorter. You'll probably find the structure of the classes much more appealing than the school you're in right now. You won't find others your age in the classes, but perhaps that's not important to you. I wouldn't be intimidated by being in a college class - you likely have more experience than a lot of others in there.
----- obSig
Dunno, I thought it was pretty tame. There are folks who have nerdy interests and who pursue them because they enjoy them. Then there are the ones who memorize pi to 100 digits and wear capes. The former type may do quirky things if they happen to enjoy doing them. The latter do quirky things for the sake of being quirky because their identity is built around being the "quirky outsider". It's irritating.
Yep a bully. So the ones who do something useful or that you approve of are, "folks who have nerdy interests and who pursue them because they enjoy them," and the ones who aren't are just doing it, "for the sake of being quirky because their identity is built around [it]."
Don't you get it. You're bullying them because you don't accept that they're DIFFERENT than you. Yes there's some overlap in nerd types, so the second type may have associated with your friends, or maybe they ostracized you because you never accepted them for who they were. Either way, that you don't like them is something for you to get over, not them.
I used to work at the Institute for Quantum Computing (http://iqc.uwaterloo.ca) in Waterloo, ON, Canada.
They offer a summer program called QCSYS for deserving high school students. You should check it out: http://iqc.uwaterloo.ca/conferences/qcsys2012
Back in the 80s, I attended National Computer Camp (please don't hold the web design against them) where I got my first real taste of coding. My daughter attended last summer and it is still an amazing environment run by its founder, Dr. Zabinski. Of course, they continue to update lessons to keep up with modern technology. They cater to all levels of programming so if that's your thing, you will definitely not be bored. There's a lot of time given to creative computing and gaming. They're pretty flexible about supporting campers various areas of interest. The food is good and there's a lot of freedom.
The only downside is that I'd say that you're probably on the older side of their campers. The mean age is probably about 12 with the majority between 11 to 13. But I know from first hand experience that they've had non-US campers before.
Take a white water kayaking course, and figure out what physics is for.
Nobody under the age of 25 should spend their 'recreational time' doing something to purposely advance their careers or anything so stupidly dull. Secondly, you will learn more by doing something real than hiding in a nerd lounge.
Perhaps most importantly, young people should seek out experiences that cause extreme emotional sensations as a way to build up the emotional muscle they need for real life. Thrill seeking, adventure, or if they aren't available, drugs are all good candidates. Wanking in a room of proto-dufuses is just another kick in the crotch that hasn't landed yet.
I disagree. Camps are a about a lot more than just learning material - there is a huge social interaction component that goes along with them that you're just not going to get on a summer job. And frankly, the social skills are the more important aspect of the program than the academic material for many of the participants (myself having been one of them.)
I strongly recommend:
http://youthprograms.mtu.edu/explorations.php
Summer Youth Programs at Michigan Tech University. I suppose it's been 16 years since I've been, but they were excellent then and a quick perusal of their site leads me to believe they are excellent now, especially if you're interested in Engineering.
There are just not many opportunities for High School students to get exposure to real engineering, but this program definitely offers them.
Oh, and there are girls there.
Anyway, I went 2 or 3 summers and always had a great time. It's not just tech class stuff, there's a strong social program associated with it as well.
Great for those of you who are in HS, and those of you who now have HS-aged children yourselves. I'm honestly not aware of another program in the US like it.
I also did the Illinois Math and Science Academy program as an incoming freshmen or sophomore (it's been a while), but their program focuses more on straight math/science and not so much on practical engineering application, so I definitely preferred Tech. Then again, I don't remember much from the IMSA camp other than the girls and the pinball machine (much time spent on both, although probably more on the pinball machine) so take that as you will. Depending on your age, you could do both; IMSA as an incoming Freshman and Michigan Tech after that.
One other difference is the IMSA program was loaded with a lot more math/science nerds (I recognized a lot of people at IMSA from math competitions), while Tech had a more well-rounded group of people and programs (a lot of participants are Tech alum who just think it's a good idea to get their kids exposed to engineering), so I also liked Tech as an opportunity to work on social skills with non-nerds in a low-pressure environment (nobody knows you when you start and you're leaving in a week or two, so no permanent damage) - and I needed the practice.
Oh, one more I did:
http://engage.illinois.edu/entry/5785
Now called "Exploring Your Options", back in my day it was S.I.T.E., student introduction to engineering. I was pretty sure at that point I was going to Illinois though (summer prior to senior year) so it was double-helpful for me in just learning the engineering department and campus, and a lot of the people I met in the camp ended up attending Illinois as well so it was a leg up on meeting people. I'd say this is a good program if you're a Senior and did the others, but if I was picking ONE, I'd still probably go with Michigan Tech. IMSA vs. UofI will just depend on age. I think the UofI program would have been less interesting if I were not already sure I were goingto UofI.
Caveat: I was in high school 16-20 years ago, so my info is a bit dated. :)
paintball
My two boys went to ID Tech Camp when they were younger. They enjoyed the video and game programming/multimedia camps but did not get to the full up programming. The Robotics camps were not well rated by other kids word of mouth - they had one bot for like 6 kids so only a couple got to actually do hands on. My nephew has been going to Explo camp for several years and enjoying it tremendously. http://www.explo.org/
If you think you can cut it, try SSP. It's a heavy-duty course on astrophysics and mathematics with some applied programming. If you plan to apply to a top tech school like MIT, Caltech, or Harvey Mudd (the vast majority of the alumni when I attended went on to those schools), it's a pretty representative of what you can expect in terms of class/study/sleep schedule (meaning very little sleep). The material is first or second year college level, and (assuming they haven't changed the program) goes very in-depth into a specific problem - calculating orbits of asteroids based on observational data. You do everything, collecting the data, to deriving how to calculate the orbit, to crunching the numbers. Quite a departure from all the textbook idealized stuff you're probably used to from high school coursework.
OR if you can't get a job and want to go to the US, contact the people at NYC Resistor, the New York Hackerspace. Just tell them you are interested in those things, you'd like to come and hang around for two weeks around people with similar interests who actually do something with them, and you need a couch to crash on. I'm pretty sure it's going to be a cheaper, more interesting and more educational alternative to a summer camp.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
From my point of view, in the UK, it seems to be preventing the British government from removing our existing freedoms.
Also, I voted for an MEP -- using a fairer voting system than for the national elections, too.
There are TONS of community colleges through out the United States. Most of them offer some sort of education enrichment courses that pretty much mirror what you are asking for. When I was a kid, my local community college (Rock Valley Community College), offered a program called Whiz Kids (this program is still run, but I believe under a different marketing name). I took classes on computer programming, robotics, electronics, and rocketry. These were classes that were designed for junior-college students, but without the exams or book work (all hands-on and labs). Both local community colleges in the area where I live now offer similar programs under the "community education" monkier.
Many larger universities offer program geared towards high-school students during the summer as well. An earlier post mentions the University of Michigan. I know that Michigan State's CS and Telecommunications programs both offer really cool classes during the summers as well.
Most of these places will start to advertise them in the early spring. You can probably do some calling of places you wish to target first to see if they have any info they would be willing to share before the marketing material comes out.
You need to google it. It's aviation oriented, but there are workshops where you get to build things too using a variety of tools and materials. My local EAA chapter gets enough YE points to sponsor a couple kids each year and we have them come back to give a report in the fall. Every one of them has had an awesome time.
That gave me a chuckle. Fluent is one of those companies that thinks adhering to a scammer-like front page template gives them a reason to be proud. FundUtopia, ha ha.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I don't know about what's available in the U.S., but perhaps going to Canada would be an alternative? Vancouver is a very nice city, and there's Science AL!VE program at Simon Fraser University, run by student volunteers. I've heard some praises of it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Can't seem to find a link to a similar program now, but around middle school age my father sent me on a 2-week camp trip. In retrospect, it was pretty amazing... We traced our way down the Patuxent River watershed. We mucked around in the swamps pretending we were muskrats, smearing detritus on our faces. We canoed to campsites, jumping out of them and sheltering below the reeds as a freak thunderstorm blew through. We took two showers the entire time, one of them lasting less than 2 minutes. We rode a skipjack to Tangier Island, and shucked oysters which used to cover the bay and filter all of the water every 4 days. We built shelters out of branches and pine needles. We were scattered out on an island and spent 3 hours of alone time just out of earshot of the next human being. We were blindfolded and led to a tree in the woods, which we later had to go find. We wrote stories about what it would be like to be a crab or a seagull. And yes, there were campfires and songs and jokes and girls and all of those other camp mainstays as well.
Good, memorable times. And yes, it was pretty educational too.
The poster is 14 and European. Call me old fashioned but I wouldn't send my child five thousand miles away on their own to a big city at that age.
Yeah, I know, everyone on slashdot was a fucking CEO at 13 and had their own helicopter.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I visited the USA when I was 14, with my parents. We did a massive 8000km road trip.
I cannot off the top of my head think of a more boring holiday than driving hundreds of kilometres each day. And as a 14 year old passenger, I think I would have become suicidal.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe. What are you going to want to do next summer, go to summer camp in North Korea?
Why does every discussion have to devolve into US bashing? This country has been heading in the wrong direction since Sep 11th and it sucks, but we still have real freedom of speech including "hate speech", and in many areas you can own just about any weapon you want, including full auto with the right tax stamp. These are things you can't do in most of Europe or Canada. Not that I have anything against Europe or Canada. Their laws are their business not mine. To the original question, if you have the means to travel to the US or another country, do it. I've lived in Europe and Asia and travel has always been a learning experience for me.
The freedoms to own unnecessarily powerful weapons and threaten people because of their colour do not rank very highly on my list of desirable things to do.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I visited the USA when I was 14, with my parents. We did a massive 8000km road trip.
I cannot off the top of my head think of a more boring holiday than driving hundreds of kilometres each day. And as a 14 year old passenger, I think I would have become suicidal.
We travelled for three weeks, and in the last two days covered about 3000km (my parents shared the driving for those days). That leaves about 260km per day. I "navigated" most of the way. I don't remember getting bored -- maybe occasionally.
We stayed somewhere different almost every day (cheap motels), and I think we saw and did things every day. Most of it was natural geography (Yellowstone National Park, Grand Canyon etc), plus some native American historical sites, and the occasional modern city.
We then spent a week lazing around on a beach, staying with some American relatives. Their preferred supermarket was 20km from their house. Driving distances for everything in America are always much greater than in Europe. At least once we drove 150km (each way!) for dinner (that was boring -- although my mum was threatened with arrest by the waiter when she let me sip her wine...).
However, I probably had a lower standard for excitement compared to my friends: I lived in a tiny village with nothing to do, and my parents were extremely over-protective, so I wasn't allowed to go anywhere alone. That was definitely detrimental to my mental health as a teenager. (According to my youngest sibling, my mum used to follow me to the end of the road every morning, staying just out of sight, to check I got on the school bus.)
Seems I'm a bit late to the party, but my youngest is going through this process right now so I have lots of info.
I'm assuming that by "camp" you really mean "going to cool classes filled with lots of nerds and maybe even some cute girls." If that is the case, then you probably won't find any "camp" that does it. What you need is a summer program, likely run by a top 100 US college/university.
A large number of them offer high school programs during the summer. Some of them give you college credits (way cool!), while others don't. At 15yo, I think you should focus on finding a good program before considering whether credits are give. If you were older, I'd place a higher priority on the credits but you have time to get those.
All of these programs have competitive admission. That means you have to apply and be accepted. Many offer scholarships. Deadlines for them are in the next couple of months so you need to get a move on.
These programs widely vary in nature so be sure to do your research. Here are some examples that I happen to be familiar with (not recommending them, I can just describe them without researching them). Here is a comparison of two programs. Both provide on-campus housing with other high-school program students, and lots of evening and weekend social activities. The BU program is fairly typical while the Stanford one is rather unique. :-) They only offer about a dozen programs. I think this year they are offering several computer science ones (eg; AI) and all of them require some degree of programming skill. I think you spend most of your time with your classmates so if female company is important to you, you may want to contact the school to find out about the typical male-to-female ratios. While they may not be able to give you exact numbers, they will have good estimates as colleges carefully track these stats.
- Boston University: Wide array of subjects. You take regular classes with other BU summer students (eg: you could be the only high school student in a class of 40 students). Must take ~8 credits (2 classes) for the ~6-week program.
- Stanford University: Has a program similar to BU's but also offers a series of 2-week, non-credit program. You take one class and are given a written appraisal when done. If the appraisal is good, it can be used for college admissions. The class has about 15~40 students, all in the same program. You live in a small dorm that only houses your classmates and your class's teaching assistants. Basically, you think about one subject, 24x7, for the two weeks. There's a formal lecture in the morning, taught by a full faculty member and then the afternoon is small groups and individual work done in your dorm (remember your teaching assistants are living with in your dorm). Looks like a wonderful 2-week geekfest. I wish they took people my age
Something like 90% of the top 100 universities have programs like BU's. My son went to BU last year and simply loved it. The Stanford program is the only one of its kind that I am aware of.
All of these programs really like taking non-American students as they like to brag about how many countries were represented in their summer program for the previous year. While you still need to apply to these programs, being non-American will likely give you a bit of a boost.
Hope this helps,
Neil
PS: You can use http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities for the list of best colleges. I'm not sure it's the best list, but it is easy to find and good enough to point you at the summer programs.
Neil Smithline http://www.neilsmithline.com