Who We Are

We're a private company, because we believe that having full-time staff to administer the program is important to delivering the best experience for our students who entrust us with 10-16 weeks of their time. However, we also believe in the importance of making extracurricular activities affordable and accessible. We act on this belief through our financial aid program as well as our continued sponsorship of various extracurricular activities around the world, including debate tournaments, business competitions, model U.N. conferences, and student journals.

• College Counselors: Horizon is not a college admission consultancy or an admission counseling company. While we believe doing a high-quality research project is beneficial to a high school student's college application in many ways, we do not offer college admissions advice or services relating to college applications. Our work starts and stops with high school research projects. If you're seeking a college counselor, we encourage you to make use of your in-school counselor, and if you've decided that you want private assistance, you might also consider as the many qualified counselors that are members of NACAC affiliate groups, or private groups such as HECA or IECA.
• Pay to Play: Horizon admits about 30% of our applicants each year, because writing a college-level paper is a demanding process for a high school student and is only helpful and educational to the most ambitious and motivated students. We pair students with mentors by assessing what research topics a students is interested in and which of our mentors is best equipped and qualified to advise them, without regard to what university the faculty member is located. Before programs like ours came about, research mentorships for high school students were often acquired through family connections or through students mass emailing university faculty. We believe that access to research opportunities should be governed through a merit-based application process rather than through personal connections. We conduct admissions on a need-agnostic basis. Although we cannot guarantee that any or every student who is admitted will be given financial aid, we never consider a student's ability to pay tuition in making admissions decisions.
• A Recommendation Letter or Publication Mill: we do not guarantee that students will get letters of recommendation or attain any particular post-project outcome such as competitive finishes as science fairs or publications, because these things cannot ethically be guaranteed. Students who do their best work in our program have the opportunity to work to earn these things, but the only thing that we guarantee by virtue of completing the program is that a student will have completed a rigorous research paper and will receive an assessment from their instructor.