In 1998, the California Legislature launched California State Summer School for Mathematics & Science (COSMOS), a four-week intensive residential summer program for high schoolers on a variety of scientific topics. Now, this program is well-known, currently located at UC campuses in Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Cruz. Students at Milpitas High School with an interest in science and math have joined the program.
The COSMOS program is divided into campuses and further divided into clusters, each focused on a topic, senior Oliver Ma said. His cluster was focused on autonomous vehicles, he added.
“I would describe COSMOS as a combination of a research program and a summer residential program,” Ma said. “Some universities have programs for high schoolers where you can spend the summer living there, taking classes, right? It’s not exactly like that. It also has some aspects of a research program because you’re doing individual work and you complete a research project.”
The program began with instruction from both the professor and TAs, the TAs being more involved, similar to how college works, Ma said. After that, they slowly transitioned into working on products themselves, he added.
“We were split up into teams of four people each, because the clusters are pretty small,” he said. “Then, we all got the car base that we were starting off with. We had to use computer-assisted design (CAD), to prototype components that would hold the different parts of our car. So that’s the physical side, and then we had to use different frameworks for the autonomous navigation functionalities of the car, which involved artificial intelligence, computer vision, and embedded Linux.”
Ma’s time at the program helped him develop his skills a lot, he said.
“There was this computer vision framework that I really learned a lot about,” Ma said. “After the program, I used that knowledge, because I wrote an article and submitted it to a research publication called Towards Data Science about that computer framework.”
Junior Leslie Dong attended COSMOS at UC San Diego the summer after his sophomore year, he said.
“I thought it was a really cool idea being able to spend time on the UC campuses,” Dong said. “They mentioned it was a great opportunity to get awards. Also, it’s relatively prestigious, and it looks good on college applications.”
Dong said he could have applied to other, more prestigious programs, but wasn’t interested. COSMOS ended up being very enjoyable, he added.
“It’s primarily a social program,” Dong said. “The education is really on point and in-depth. You get to interact with a lot of brilliant people who are also really fun.”
Sometimes, you aren’t given a good dorm, depending on the rotation of the year, Dong said. In UCSD, they did not have the best one, he said.
“We had to take cold showers,” Dong said. “Terrible experience, but being around people in the environment, it’s actually really fun. It’s like having that kind of freedom. You know, you’re not used to it as a high schooler.”
COSMOS is a great way to dip your toes into the coursework of your interest, Dong added. It’s really enlightening, he added.
“At the time, I was super interested in engineering. I wanted to be like a mechanical engineer – not anymore,” Dong said. “While it was fun in the moment, I don’t think I would have held up that well, considering I suck at physics.”
Sophomore Arnav Agrawal will attend COSMOS this summer at UC Santa Cruz, he said. He chose COSMOS over the Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology (M.E.T.) program at UC Berkeley because it felt more established, Agrawal said.
“I’ve heard a lot more about COSMOS, and the other one is a little more new,” Agrawal said. “I just wanted something that shows experience, and living on a UC campus is a pretty good experience in my opinion.”
For the application, he had to write a 300-word statement about himself and what he wants to do at COSMOS, Agrawal said. He also had to submit his grades and two extracurricular activities, he added.
“I never really had to think about a statement of interest before,” he said. “It really juiced my brain. I started thinking about how can I connect things in my past to what I want to do in the future.
Agrawal chose AI and machine learning, since they would be very applicable for the future, he said. However, he’s unsure if that’s what he wants to do, he added.
“I just want to experience a bunch of new things,” Agrawal said. “After I experience everything, I’ll always be able to figure out what I really want to do in life. COSMOS is just another step in figuring out what I want to do in college and life in general.”
As long as you make the most out of your program, you’ll be set up for success, Ma said.
“You’re not doing it for a grade, right?” he said. “No one’s going to go up to you and help you stay on task. I feel like if you really want to get the most out of this program, which you’re paying for and spending the summer on, you should try to get as much learning as you can out of it.”