About

The High School Summer Research Program, run by NC State's College of Natural Resources in partnership with North Carolina A&T's College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, is a commuter program on or near NC State's Raleigh campus that introduces high schoolers to forestry and natural resources research. The 2026 session runs July 13–24, meeting daily from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. with lunch provided; note that this is a shorter format than in past years, when the program ran a full four weeks under the same director.

Students learn the full research process — forming a hypothesis, collecting field data, running analysis, and presenting findings — while getting exposure to a range of forestry topics; past cohorts have studied coarse woody debris in campus forest plots, along with topics like drone applications in forestry, forestry economics, and forestry hydrology. Undergraduate and graduate students and working professionals from the field serve as mentors, and NC State's Office of Undergraduate Research hosts seminars during the program. Students present their findings at a concluding mini-symposium, and past participants have gone on to present at the State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium the following fall or spring.

Cost, exact grade-level eligibility, and application deadline are not published on the program's official page; the only stated point of contact is program director Dr. Zakiya Leggett by email. Some secondary sources describe the program as free with a modest completion stipend and open broadly to high schoolers, but this is unconfirmed against the primary source and should not be treated as fact until verified directly. The program is funded by the Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund.

For a North Carolina student curious about forestry or natural resources as a career path — a field with real workforce demand but relatively little visibility in most high school curricula — this offers a genuine, mentored introduction to the research process in a subject most pre-college catalogs never touch. It suits a student who's undecided or exploring rather than one who's already committed to the field; the program's own framing is about exposure and career discovery, not producing a polished, competition-ready research paper. Families should treat the current details as provisional until confirmed directly with the program given that the program releases minimal detail about its application process or format.