About

The NYU Tandon User Experience Design program is a two-week skills immersion in UX design methodology, hosted at NYU's School of Engineering in downtown Brooklyn. Students in grades 8–11 work through the full design thinking process — problem framing, user research, ideation, prototyping, and testing — using industry-standard tools including Adobe CC and Figma. The program is collaborative and project-based: teams develop actual digital products or services for defined user groups, then present their work at the end of the session. Brooklyn's position as a center of tech product design and startup culture gives the program an urban context that extends beyond the classroom.

UX design is a field that receives almost no formal attention in standard high school curricula, making this one of the relatively few pre-college programs that gives students genuine hands-on exposure to a professional discipline they are unlikely to encounter otherwise. The NYU Tandon institutional setting — an engineering school with deep connections to New York's tech and design industries — provides guest lecture access and a peer environment shaped by students specifically interested in the technology-design intersection. The program can be bundled with NYU Tandon's XR Through Virtual Worlds session for $4,500, an option worth noting for students interested in exploring both interaction design and augmented reality development in the same summer.

No credit is awarded and no financial aid is available — two honest constraints families should understand before applying. For students who already know they are drawn to product design, human-computer interaction, or the intersection of technology and user behavior, the UX program offers a focused two-week introduction that few programs match.