The Harvard Ventures-TECH Summer Program is the premier high school innovation academy for aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators. HVTSP students gain high-impact, real-world experience across various disciplines by working with top venture capital-backed startups and learning directly from world-renowned CEOs, investors, and Harvard University faculty.
The Harvard Ventures-TECH Summer Program (HVTSP) offers a unique opportunity for ambitious, high-achieving high school students to immerse themselves in the startup ecosystem. This selective program pairs students with cutting-edge startups for internships across a wide variety of disciplines and industries, providing them with hands-on experience in the dynamic world of technology and entrepreneurship. Participants will be mentored directly by founders and C-Suite executives, ensuring personalized guidance and unparalleled insight into business strategy and innovation.
No prior entrepreneurial experience is expected or required from our participants. Instead, we look for motivated self-starters and go-getters with an interest in gaining experience in a specific industry or learning more about startups by joining one. Demonstrated interest in startups, technology, business, or gaining hands-on experience in a particular discipline is a plus.
The capstone of HVTSP is your internship. We match every student with a real, industry leading, venture capital-backed startup run by serial entrepreneurs solving world-changing problems. Students work directly with the CEOs and founders of these firms throughout the 6-week internship in an industry and role tailored toward their individual career interests and goals.
Students attend daily interactive seminars and workshops run by founders of multimillion-dollar companies, world-class investors, and Harvard University professors. Workshops teach students about technology, innovation management, and problem-solving skills. Classes range from fireside chats with key thought leaders to hands-on sessions covering MBA-level case studies.
Every student works closely with our core team to discover and develop their ambitions. In addition to their academic experience as educators, the HVTSP team has collectively scaled products to millions of users, IPO'd a company on the NASDAQ, raised $300M in funding, invested in OpenAI, and joined Y Combinator. We help students find their path to college applications and beyond.
“HVTSP is the perfect way for young innovators to learn by doing. We believe the best way to gain experience and develop critical thinking skills is by hands-on learning, not lectures in a classroom.”
At their startups, students solve a real-world challenge by building a project or product from scratch over their internship, collaborating with startup founders while navigating a reverse-engineered project. It's like the business case studies taught at schools such as HBS, but interactive with real-world implications. At every step, students work directly with CEOs/founders and are taught to make critical business and product decisions – all while building a real project for a real company.
HVTSP works with leading companies in a diverse set of industries supported by the world's best venture capital investment firms. We have a variety of partner firms, ranging from STEM disciplines at the forefront of Al and medical/biotech to financial technology firms, nonprofits, and arts/ media collectives. Students work in teams at an innovative startup backed by investors such as Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Andreeson Horowitz, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and many more. The venture capital investors of the participating startups at HVTSP have over $200B in assets under management (AUM) and have previously been the first investors in companies such as Google, DoorDash, DropBox, CoinBase, Cruise, and more.
In addition to their internship experience and mentorship from the startup, students will have numerous opportunities to learn more about startups and entrepreneurship and experience personal growth through classes and events. HVTSP features almost daily fireside chats led by luminaries in their respective fields. There will also be skill-building sessions and workshops that cover innovation management, strategy, operations, and investing in various verticals. Below is a list of returning course teachers and speakers from last year, with dozens more to be announced.
Akash Malhotra: Partner at The House Fund, Forbes 30 Under 30
Thomas Deng: Managing Director at Goldman Sachs Asia
Paul Bottino: Lecturer at Harvard College
Cory Levy: Founder of Z Fellows, Forbes 30 Under 30
Alvin Xiao: General Partner at FutureX Capital
Sean Strong: Investor at Pear VC
Cam Urban: GPM at Google, 2x acquired founder
Sid Sridhar: Venture Partner at Draper Associates, 2x acquired founder
Mark Weber: Principal Investor at Tectonic, IBM/MIT AI Researcher
Tim Xiong: Senior Director at Plug and Play, ex AWS, ex Microsoft
The Harvard Ventures-TECH Summer Program (HVTSP) admissions process is competitive, considering applicants’ ambition, motivation, interest in early-stage startups, and academic readiness. All high school grades and international applicants are encouraged to apply, with early applicants favored due to limited spots. Students enrolled in undergraduate or graduate programs may not participate; however, students who have graduated high school but are on a gap year or are yet to begin their undergraduate studies may apply.
There are three admissions rounds: invite-only, early, and regular. Admission is by invitation only for the initial application round. Candidates must have a valid link or code, reserved for alumni and partner organization members. When they receive their decisions, applicants from the invite-only admissions round who are admitted have the option to either accept and enroll in HVTSP or defer admission for a future round. Deferrals are treated as re-applications, with no guarantee of re-admission. Early admissions follow this round, opening up the application to all eligible students without invites. Regular admissions follow after the early round, with decisions issued by the respective dates below.
For all admission rounds, students may be requested to participate in an interview. Interviews are conducted on Zoom and are designed to be an informal chat between an admissions officer and the candidate, allowing the candidate to share more about their interests and motivations as well as ask the admissions officer any questions they may have. Receiving an interview request is not a requirement to be admitted nor a guarantee of admission.
The 2025 Harvard Ventures-TECH Summer Program will run entirely online across two, six-week summer sessions:
Session I: June 9th to July 18th, 2025
Session II: July 7th to August 15th, 2025
Leading up to the official start date, admitted program participants will be invited to exclusive, virtual networking opportunities and fireside chats with various entrepreneurs, investors, and Harvard University faculty.
Tuition for the 6-week HVTSP 2025 program is $4750, regardless of whether a student enrolls in Session I or Session II. Barring extraordinary circumstances, tuition is due by the enrollment deadline of the round within which a student is admitted. There is also a $35 application fee.
HVTSP is proud to provide a robust financial aid program, offering substantial scholarships to a significant portion of accepted high school students each year. As a well-funded pre-college summer program, we are dedicated to making education accessible to all. In 2024 alone, we awarded over $100,000 in financial aid, with multiple high school students receiving scholarships that covered 100% of their tuition. Admissions are conducted on a need-blind basis, meaning a request for financial aid is not considered in TECH’s decision to admit a student. After a candidate is admitted, their financial aid request is considered and financial aid may be awarded based on numerous factors. Our financial aid extends only to program fees and we are unable to offer application fee waivers.
The Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard is based on the belief that boundaries – between disciplines, people, organizations, and ideas – need to be crossed continually to create the insights that lead to innovations because socially useful and commercially viable advancements require the right mix of scientific and engineering knowledge, entrepreneurial know-how, and worldly perspective. TECH enables this holistic exploration by serving as a crossroads of innovation education. Operating within the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, TECH also provides opportunities for members of Harvard’s innovation community to gather and enrich their college experiences through undergraduate courses, study groups, field trips, project-based college credits, mentorship relationships, and special events.
In previous years, we’ve been proud to host HVTSP and our winter fellowship HVTWF. Last year, HVTSP hosted ~150 high school students across two sessions. Between HVTSP and HVTWF, our team had been honored to read the stories of over 3,500 applicants from almost 100 countries. HVTSP 2024 saw over $100k of financial aid scholarships given out and led to the creation of dozens of student and alumni-founded companies, many of which have received venture capital funding and are in operation today. Students have also gone on to attend top universities, including Harvard College, for their undergraduate studies while pursuing entrepreneurship and/or careers in technology, venture capital, and finance.
Further information about TECH’s mission and history can be found here. This also contains information about our venture capital and startup partners, the previous number of program applicants, and a data-driven summary of their experiences.
Please contact tech@seas.harvard.edu with any questions.