The Summer Institute is not currently enrolling.
Tracks like this one were its capstone curriculum. This page stays up because the method it describes is still how we work. What is running right now is founder-led college readiness coaching. If you are not sure what fits, tell us the situation and a person will route it.
Pre-Engineering Track · Inaugural Summer 2028
Capstone agent · Build hardware AI.
I built an AI agent that suggests CAD revisions based on tolerance constraints.
3 weeks · Grades 8–12 · Chicago · Summer 2028 · tuition & scholarships
What your child will build
An agentic system that takes an engineering drawing, reasons about tolerances and material specifications, suggests revisions for manufacturability, and produces a design-review memo a junior engineer can present to their team lead.
The CAD-revision agent
Pre-Engineering capstone · illustrative run
Ingests a CAD drawing or parametric model and parses dimensions, tolerances, and materials
Cross-references manufacturing constraints — tolerance stack-up, material yield, machining feasibility
Suggests revisions with reasoning grounded in design-for-manufacturability principles
Surfaces edge-case failure modes from a curated spec library
Generates a design-review memo with a prioritized revision list
Logs an audit trail of every reasoning step for the team lead's review
Illustrative run — this is the working agent your child builds, step by step, and ships to a personal URL.
Representative profile · mentor announced pre-seasonCo-Teaching Faculty
Recruiting from · the McCormick School of Engineering network
Our pre-engineering track will be co-taught by a practicing engineer — recruited from McCormick School of Engineering and the broader hardware and systems engineering ecosystem — alongside a senior software engineer. Your child works directly with an engineer who has shipped physical products and who can articulate the difference between a clever simulation and a manufacturable design. The mentor relationship continues past the program: pre-engineering students who perform well receive a personal letter of recommendation and direct introductions into the broader practitioner network.
What students leave understanding
Students leave understanding the difference between a design that runs in CAD and a design that survives a manufacturing review.
Curriculum Deep-Dive
The pre-engineering cohort splits off from the shared Week 1 foundations and works directly with the engineer on tolerance reasoning, manufacturability, and the design-review patterns unique to hardware AI.
Week 1 foundations are shared across all 5 tracksWeek 3 builds + admissions coaching
Sample student work
Sample capstone projects illustrating the scope of Pre-Engineering work. Inaugural cohort is Summer 2028 — these are not real-alumni outcomes.
Sample capstone spec — scoped for a rising 12th grader
Built an agent that reviews a multi-part 3D-printed assembly, propagates dimensional tolerances through the stack, and surfaces interferences before the print job runs.
Sample capstone spec — scoped for a rising 11th grader
Built an agent that takes a part spec and proposes alternative materials with revised tolerances and cost implications, citing yield strength and machinability data.
Why this track wins for admissions
An admissions reader at a top pre-engineering university — MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley EECS, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern McCormick — is looking for the rare applicant who has built something real and can talk about the engineering judgment behind it. Most strong pre-engineering applicants present FIRST Robotics seasons, science-fair projects, and AP Physics scores — all important, all common. Far fewer can sit across from an interviewer and discuss the design tradeoffs in tolerance stack-up automation, the limits of simulation, or what a manufacturing review actually evaluates. Your child finishes the program with a working CAD-revision agent at a personal URL, an architecture writeup an admissions reader can verify, and a Common App essay built around the project — a piece of writing that makes their interest in engineering specific, hands-on, and verifiably their own.
— Jinwoong “Peter” Lee, founder · UC Berkeley ’18 · 8 years of software at Amazon & Ring · 11 years in education · 80+ students placed at top universities
Talk through your child’s admissions strategy
Pre-Engineering FAQ
Pre-Engineering · Selective by design
This track belongs to the Summer Institute, which is planned for 2028 and is not enrolling; no application is being accepted yet. What is running now is founder-led college readiness coaching.