About

The Wake Forest Summer Immersion Program is a one-week, residential pre-college program on WFU's Reynolda Campus in Winston-Salem, NC, open to current 9th–12th graders. Rather than one fixed curriculum, students choose from 25 distinct on-campus institutes spanning STEM (Artificial Intelligence, Biology Research, Coding and Computer Science, Engineering, Health and Exercise Science, Medicine, Neuroscience, Psychology, Regenerative Medicine, Sports Medicine, Technology, Women's Health), business and pre-professional tracks (Business, Business Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Finance and Investing, Law, Leadership, Sports Business, Sports Marketing, Policy and Politics, Debate and Public Advocacy), and creative/writing tracks (Filmmaking, Screenwriting, Writing for Life). A separate year-round Online Immersion Program covers a smaller subset of these subjects asynchronously for students who can't travel to campus.

For 2026, six one-week on-campus sessions run between June 7 and July 24, with Sunday check-in from 3:00–4:45 p.m., programming Monday through Thursday from 8:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m. plus evening activities, and Friday checkout at noon. All 12 STEM institutes are priced at $3,500 (tuition subject to change year to year); pricing for the business, pre-professional, and creative institutes was not confirmed on the pages checked in this pass and should be verified before publishing a blanket figure. Courses carry no secondary school or college credit; all participants receive an official Wake Forest University Certificate of Completion. Need-based scholarship support is available program-wide.

Each institute is led by an "Academic Leader" (typically WFU teaching or research faculty) supported by graduate student instructors who bring their own active research into the daily schedule — in the Biology Research Institute, for example, students spend real class time on fieldwork, lab techniques, and guest lectures built directly around what the graduate instructors are currently studying. This structure — a genuine, currently-practicing researcher's own project shaping the week rather than a generic syllabus — appears to be a defining feature of the STEM institutes specifically, though it should be confirmed on a per-institute basis before assuming it holds across all 25 tracks.

Given the sheer range of institutes under one shared logistics structure (same campus, same 1-week format, same application system), this entry covers the program at the umbrella level; a family should treat institute choice as the primary decision and check the specific institute's own page for its detailed curriculum, since content genuinely differs by field rather than following one common academic template.