If you want to work with large datasets, build predictive models, write and run code in languages like Python, and use professional-grade tools that researchers and industry practitioners use daily, all while still in high school, one of the best ways to do so is by participating in a data science program. They also give you the chance to gain practical experience in areas like statistical analysis, programming, machine learning, bioinformatics, and computational modeling. Many data science programs embed you in actual university lab environments, where you will contribute to ongoing research projects rather than completing pre-packaged coursework. Others focus on the intersection of data science and specific domains like health, biology, engineering, or public policy, so you can see how quantitative skills translate into real-world decisions.
Why should you choose a program in New Jersey?
New Jersey is home to a concentration of research universities, like Rutgers, Princeton, NJIT, and Stevens Institute of Technology, that run competitive high school data science programs. Several of these programs are fully funded through state or private sources, making them more accessible. New Jersey’s industrial base in pharmaceuticals, biotech, and technology also means many programs incorporate direct exposure to professionals working in data-driven fields, through site visits, guest lectures, or industry mentors. Past Governor’s School projects, for example, have involved deep learning, signal processing, and NLP, all sourced from mentors at Rutgers research labs.
With that, here are 15 data science programs for high school students in New Jersey!
If you’re looking for other STEM programs in the New Jersey area, you could also check out this article.
15 Data Science Programs for High School Students in New Jersey
1. Princeton University Laboratory Learning Program (LLP)
Location: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate: Extremely selective
Dates: 5-8 weeks during summer (determined by each lab)
Application Deadline: February 15 – March 15
Eligibility: Local NJ high school students (16+) who are U.S. citizens
Princeton LLP places you in an active Princeton research lab to work full-time alongside faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students on an assigned project for the full program duration. Past projects have included topics such as Machine Learning Methods for Power Magnetics Modeling, Molecular Modeling and Machine Learning of Polymers, and Machine Learning and Molecular Dynamic Simulations of High-Pressure Combustion. Instead of following a structured curriculum, you will carry out tasks that are part of the lab’s actual research agenda, picking up technical skills like statistical modeling, simulation, or data visualization as the project requires. At the end of the program, you will submit a two-page written summary of your work.
2. NJ Governor’s School of Engineering and Technology (GSET)
Location: Rutgers University School of Engineering, New Brunswick, NJ
Cost: Fully funded
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Extremely selective; 100 or fewer students accepted per year
Dates: July 6 – 31
Application Deadline: January 8
Eligibility: High school juniors who are New Jersey residents and are among the top students in their school
The NJ Governor’s School of Engineering and Technology is a four-week residential program at Rutgers’ School of Engineering that combines elective coursework with a faculty-mentored team research project, culminating in a conference-style symposium. The computer science and applied mathematics elective track covers topics including computational complexity and algorithm analysis, both foundational to data science. Past research teams have worked on projects in deep learning for precision agriculture using Boston Dynamics’ SPOT robot, robustness testing of AI-driven biometric authentication, NLP and computer vision integrated into an interactive learning platform, and machine learning-based litter detection using UAV surveillance. You will also get to participate in projects developed under the guidance of Rutgers engineering faculty. Your team will be expected to produce a written paper and a formal presentation on the project for the end-of-program symposium.
3. NJ Governor’s School in the Sciences (GSNJS)
Location: Drew University, Madison, NJ
Cost: Fully funded
Acceptance Rate: Highly selective
Dates: July 12 – August 1
Application Deadline: Student applications must be submitted by mid-January
Eligibility: NJ residents who have completed junior year at a NJ public, private, or home school and have been nominated by their school
At GSNJS, you will take three college-level core courses drawn from neurobiology, cell biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, anthropology, and computer science. The computer science lab covers programming and computational problem-solving, while the team research component includes data-driven projects. Faculty instructors include Drew professors with backgrounds in data analytics and software engineering, and a former IBM software engineer who co-authored published work on urban legislation assessment using data analytics. Your team will design a research question, collect and analyze data, or conduct experiments, and present findings to the full cohort on the final day.
4. Governor’s STEM Scholars
Location: Across New Jersey: Rutgers, NJIT, Princeton, Stevens, Kean, and Montclair State
Cost/Stipend: Free; $1,000 stipend
Acceptance Rate: Highly selective
Dates: Academic-year program; Saturday conferences are held in fall, winter, late winter, and spring
Application Deadline: June 11
Eligibility: NJ-based high school sophomores, juniors, or seniors with a minimum 3.5 GPA
The Governor’s STEM Scholars program has you move through a year-long program of four Saturday conferences, a mentored team project, and optional site visits and industry engagements across New Jersey. The team project requires you to develop a data-informed, prototype-backed solution to a UN Sustainable Development Goal challenge. This means you will research quantitative evidence, build a working model or prototype, and present your findings to an industry panel of judges at the culminating Commencement Conference. Conferences bring in STEM professionals for fireside chats and panel discussions, and site visits have taken scholars to companies, including Siemens, Panasonic, and Bristol Myers Squibb. You will also gain access to an exclusive internship database connecting you to NJ-based STEM companies actively recruiting high school participants.
5. NJIT Summer STEMx: Artificial Intelligence Track
Location: NJIT Campus, Newark, NJ
Cost: $725 per week + $70 non-refundable application fee
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Not specified
Dates: Week 1: July 6 – 10; Week 2: July 13 – 17; Week 3: July 20 – 24; Week 4: July 27 – 30 (only for students enrolled in all 3 previous weeks)
Application Deadline: Early: March 1; Regular: April 10
Eligibility: Current high school sophomores and juniors
You will spend one week at NJIT’s Newark campus in a faculty-taught AI course that covers how neural networks are structured and trained. This includes the mechanics of forward and back propagation, how data flows through a model during training, and how to build a functioning AI model using high-level programming tools. The format is project-based rather than lecture-only, letting you build and test models during the week, with NJIT faculty available to guide your work directly. You will also cover U.S. regulatory frameworks governing AI deployment, giving you context on how data-driven systems are governed in practice. You can enroll in one or multiple weeks, with cybersecurity and applied engineering offered alongside AI in other weeks.
6. Stevens Institute of Technology Pre-College Summer Program: Artificial Intelligence in Modern Society
Location: Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
Cost: $3,350; Financial aid offered
Acceptance Rate: Selective
Dates: July 12 – 18
Application Deadline: Priority: March 16; Final: June 1
Eligibility: Rising high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors
During this one-week residential course at Stevens’ Hoboken campus, you will be taught by Stevens faculty how AI systems are built and trained, starting with the history of AI research and moving through the architecture of neural networks. You will also learn about how training datasets are used to develop and evaluate models and how to build basic models yourself using high-level programming languages or AI application software. You will examine how AI is regulated in the United States, including current federal policy guidance on AI deployment and a relevant frame for understanding how data-driven systems operate beyond the technical level. Students who later enroll at Stevens as undergraduates qualify for a merit scholarship.
7. Stevens Institute of Technology Pre-College Summer Program – Changemaking Through Data: The Science of Human Behavior
Location: Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
Cost: $3,350; Financial aid offered
Acceptance Rate: Selective
Dates: July 5 – 11
Application Deadline: Priority: March 16; Final: June 1
Eligibility: Rising high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors
This one-week residential course at Stevens focuses on data science as a tool for analyzing social and political problems. You will examine how large-scale data collection, algorithmic decision-making, and digital platforms generate real-world consequences such as privacy erosion, misinformation propagation, and discriminatory algorithmic outputs, and learn to analyze these issues through a data-driven framework. The curriculum requires you to work through case studies on how quantitative evidence is used to shape laws and regulations, developing both technical data literacy and the ability to critically assess how data systems are designed and governed. You will complete hands-on activities applying these frameworks to current policy questions, experiencing how data science is applied to real-world scenarios.
8. Columbia University DBMI Summer Research Program
Location: Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York, NY
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate: Highly competitive
Dates: June 29 – August 14
Application Deadline: February 20
Eligibility: Rising high school seniors (17+) located in the NYC metro area (including northern NJ) for the full program duration
You will be placed in an active Columbia DBMI research lab for seven weeks, working on a project in areas such as natural language processing for clinical text, large language models, causal inference, AI for clinical decision support, or health disparities research, at the intersection of machine learning and data science methods. Alongside your lab placement, you will complete a structured mini-course of faculty-recorded lectures on biomedical informatics. You will also attend weekly lab meetings, present recent journal articles during journal clubs, and complete bootcamp sessions on data science and machine learning for healthcare using Python. Students with prior programming experience join a more advanced track. It will cover observational health data science using the OHDSI framework, where you will learn to define clinical cohorts, characterize patient populations, and design predictive analytics studies.
9. Rutgers Waksman Student Scholars Program (WSSP): Academic Year Track
Location: At your own high school during the academic year, with some summer components at Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate: Not selective
Dates: Year-long (running through the academic year)
Application Deadline: Not specified
Eligibility: Students at a school with a participating WSSP teacher
In this unique, in-school program, you will work on a year-long bioinformatics research project alongside classmates, guided by your school’s science teacher and supported by Rutgers faculty. You will analyze novel genes from the duckweed plant Landoltia punctata using BLAST and associated NCBI databases—the same computational tools used in academic and pharmaceutical molecular biology research. The core analytical work involves using BLAST to align your isolated sequences against known genes across species, interpreting the alignment outputs to assess similarity and novelty, and determining whether your findings meet the quality threshold for publication. If they do, your sequence will be submitted to GenBank and published under your name and your teacher’s name. The program year ends with the Waksman Forum Poster Session, where you will present your research to an audience of scientists, educators, and peers.
10. Rutgers Youth Enjoy Science (RUYES): Cancer Research Program
Location: Rutgers Cancer Institute, New Brunswick, NJ
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate: Highly selective
Dates: 4th week of June – August 25
Application Deadline: Opens November 4
Eligibility: Rising high school juniors or seniors (16+) attending school in NJ, NY, PA, or CT; Must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents
RUYES provides two consecutive summers of hands-on cancer biology research training at the Rutgers Cancer Institute, giving you the chance to work under direct faculty mentorship for 10 weeks each summer. Funded by the National Cancer Institute through the NIH, the program places you in a lab where research may involve analyzing genomic sequencing outputs, processing biological datasets, and applying statistical methods to identify patterns in patient or experimental data, all of which are standard data science workflows applied to a biomedical context. Your weekly responsibilities will include wet lab or computational work, attendance at seminars on cancer biology and current scientific literature, and preparation of a research poster and a 10-minute talk for the Annual Research Day. You will also complete professional development and community outreach activities during the academic year.
11. Rutgers Waksman Institute Summer Experience (WISE): Bioinformatics
Location: Waksman Institute, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ + Virtual
Cost: $2,200 (in-person); $600 (vWISE)
Acceptance Rate: Selective
Dates: June 22 – July 2 or July 27 – August 7 (in person); August 10 – 21 (vWISE)
Application Deadline: Rolling till full; Opens February 1
Eligibility: High school students who have completed at least one biology course
WISE lets you conduct a genuine bioinformatics research project analyzing the genome of the duckweed plant, Landoltia punctata, using BLAST (the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool used by researchers globally through NCBI) to compare your isolated gene sequences against known genes across species. While the in-person version has a significant wet lab component before moving into computational sequence analysis, the virtual version (vWISE) skips the wet lab entirely and proceeds directly to the computational bioinformatics phase using BLAST and associated NCBI tools online, making it the more directly data science-focused of the two tracks. If your analysis meets quality standards, your sequence will be submitted to GenBank, the international DNA repository maintained by NCBI, and published under your name. Regardless of whether you want the more immersive experience of the in-person program or the data-heavy experience of the virtual, both will help you produce a real, citable scientific output.
12. Rutgers Young Scholars Program in Discrete Mathematics
Location: Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
Cost: $4,800; Limited scholarships offered
Acceptance Rate: Highly selective
Dates: July 6 – 31
Application Deadline: Rolling till full; Starting early February
Eligibility: Mathematically talented high school students
Discrete mathematics is the mathematical backbone of computer science and data science, covering graph theory, combinatorics, and algorithm analysis, all of which underpin how modern data systems are designed and why they work. Rather than following a lecture-based course format, you will work through open-ended problems individually and in groups, building the kind of rigorous logical reasoning that translates directly into algorithm design, data structure analysis, and computational thinking. You will be guided by Rutgers mathematics faculty and undergraduate TAs studying mathematics or computer science, and you will meet professionals from academia and industry who apply mathematical methods in data science and technology careers.
13. NASA GeneLab for High Schools (GL4HS)
Location: Virtual
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate/Cohort Size: Not specified
Dates: June 1 – August 28
Application Deadline: March 15
Eligibility: Rising high school juniors and seniors who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents with a minimum 3.0 GPA
NASA GL4HS is a 12-week self-paced curriculum introducing you to space biology research, with a focus on omics-based methodologies—the large-scale analysis of biological molecules such as genes, proteins, and metabolites. The core technical content covers how to analyze complex biological datasets, including genetic sequences and protein interactions. You will also learn bioinformatics and computational biology techniques for processing and interpreting large-scale omics data drawn from NASA’s Open Science Data Repository. If you choose to go further, you can join the optional Capstone Project, which requires your team to develop a hypothesis, analyze one or more datasets from the Open Science Data Repository, and prepare a research proposal presentation delivered at a competitive synchronous Capstone Showcase at the end of the program. The top eight teams advance to a written proposal run-off competition. The top three might receive an all-expenses-paid trip to present at the annual American Society for Gravitational and Space Research conference.
14. MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute (BWSI) – CogWorks: Build Your Own Cognitive Assistant
Location: Virtual
Cost: Free (families with income under $200,000); $2,400 (families with income above $200,000)
Acceptance Rate: Highly selective
Dates: 4 weeks in July
Application Deadline: March 31
Eligibility: Current high school sophomores or juniors in the United States
BWSI CogWorks requires you to first complete a free online prerequisite course covering Python, Git and GitHub, NumPy, introductory neural networks, and image classification, which serves as the basis for your summer program application. If selected, you will spend four weeks working in small teams through three project modules, each targeting a different applied machine learning domain: audio (digital signal recording, sampling, discrete Fourier transforms, and pattern recognition), vision (image classification), and language (natural language processing and cognitive assistant development). Every lecture is paired with Python-based coding exercises, and weekly milestones require your team to produce working software rather than just written assignments. Teams use professional tools, including Git for version control and VSCode for collaborative development, and the program culminates in a final event where teams demonstrate their completed cognitive assistants.
15. MITES Semester
Location: Virtual
Cost: Free
Acceptance Rate: Highly selective
Dates: June – December
Application Deadline: February 1
Eligibility: High school juniors who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents
MITES Semester is a six-month, fully remote STEM and college preparation intensive. Across the six months, you will complete two challenging courses, one being a core STEM offering in subjects like calculus, physics, or computer science, and the other being a project-based elective in data science adjacent fields like computational biology, geospatial data analysis, and machine learning. The schedule is intensive, and the coursework is commensurate with an undergraduate level. At the end of the summer portion of the program, you will present your project at the MITES Semester Conference. After that, the fall phase begins with weekly college-readiness workshops and networking with STEM professionals.
One more option – Horizon Academic Research Program
If you’re looking for a competitive mentored research program, consider applying to Horizon’s Research Seminars and Labs! This is a selective virtual research program that lets you engage in advanced research and develop a research paper on a subject of your choosing. Horizon has worked with 1000+ high school students so far and offers 600+ research specializations for you to choose from. You can find the application link here!
Image source: Rutgers University