MIT-run science camp for Native high school students opens applications
Applications for the 2027 Tulsa Advanced Sciences Camp open Nov. 1, offering Native American high school students a week of graduate-level science instruction at the University of Tulsa at no cost.
The program, known as TASC, covers everything: airfare or mileage, housing in a university residence hall, all meals, lab materials and activities. There is no application fee. Students fly in from across the country — the 2026 cohort included students from Tulsa and from Fairbanks, Alaska.
TASC is a program of the Priscilla King Gray Center for Social Impact, MIT’s public service center, and is taught by MIT and Harvard undergraduates. It was founded in 2025 by Jack Carson, an MIT undergraduate and Cherokee Nation citizen. Allie Zong, a Harvard undergraduate and researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, serves as associate director.
The program was built around a gap in access rather than a gap in ability. Fewer than 15 percent of high schools serving the Cherokee Nation reservation offer BC-level calculus or AP-level computer science, and most reservations are further behind.
[QUOTE — Carson or Zong, on the access gap and why the program exists. 2-3 sentences.]
Students choose one of four tracks on the first evening, after meeting the instructors, and stay with it for the duration: Chemistry and Energy, DNA Technology, AI Engineering, or Fundamentals of Reality. Groups run about five students to one instructor, and two of the tracks do bench work in the university’s science building, where students run the techniques used to read and edit a genome. No prior coding, lab or advanced math experience is required.
There are no tests, no grades and no credit. Organizers say that is deliberate — nothing goes on a transcript, which is what allows the week to be exploratory.
Afternoons and evenings turn to workshops on reasoning and decision-making: estimating quantities under uncertainty, recognizing rhetorical manipulation, examining inherited values, and breaking down personal goals to find what a student is actually after. Guest speakers at the 2026 program included Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. of the Cherokee Nation, U.S. Rep. Kevin Hern, legal scholar Stacy Leeds, and admissions officers from MIT and New York University.
The application asks for basic information and at least two essays of up to 500 words, chosen from four prompts. One of the four asks applicants to make the most persuasive argument they can that TASC is not an effective use of MIT’s funding. Organizers say students have been admitted on that answer.
[QUOTE — Carson, on the adversarial prompt and what it selects for. 1-2 sentences.]
Applicants must be rising sophomores, juniors or seniors enrolled in a federally recognized tribe with a grade point average above 3.0; exceptional rising freshmen may also apply. Students may be nominated by teachers, counselors, tribal education offices or community leaders, but nomination is not required and direct applications are read the same way. Applicants may use AI tools on their essays and are asked to disclose how they did.
Rather than advertise, the program recruits through tribal education officials, superintendents and school counselors, who circulate it through their own networks. More than 70 percent of the 2025 pilot cohort came from rural and highly underserved communities.
Former students return as staff. All three teaching assistants at the 2026 program had attended as students the year before, and two members of the 2026 cohort will return as teaching assistants in 2027.
[QUOTE — alum or returning TA, on the experience. 2-3 sentences.]
TASC is supported by the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and hosted by the University of Tulsa. The 2027 program runs July 25 to Aug. 3. Applications open Nov. 1, 2026 at tasc.mit.edu.
