Build Leadership, Showcase Your Potential, Impress Admissions and Prepare for Your Future at Skills for Success
Ages 15-19, Boston University, 2025
Stand Out to Colleges with Rare Real-World Skills
Scholarship Pre-Apply
What Our Students are Saying
Hear from Berra, an International Student (Istanbul, Turkey)
Hear from Zeybek
“Just do it!. You’ll learn more in 2 weeks than in 2 years of high school. You learn so many useful skills that you never learned in high school and you meet lifelong friends."
-Zeybek, S4S 2024
Hear from Ryan
Hear from Olivia
“This program has triggered me to grow myself. By creating an environment for innovative approaches, facilitating open feedback and by putting students in situations where they need to problem solve effectively, Futures Forge taught me so much.”
--Olivia, S4S 2024
Futures Forge Alumni Win.
Futures Forge alumni have a dramatic advantage applying for, and arriving at, their universities and internships.
Our alumni are more confident, better leaders, better teammates, better speakers. They are elite problem-solvers and critical thinkers. They have superior grit and adaptability.
It shows in their personal essays, their interviews, and—most importantly—their first day on campus and on site.
Apply Today
Futures Forge's founders and curriculum leads graduated from MIT and Oxford and founded multiple companies (management consulting, devtools startup, hardware startup). We have published books on political polarization, tertiary education, and technical problem-solving, and have jointly coached and managed over 100 top-talent young adults.
The foundation of our companies’ success has always been the rapid development of talented young people; our employees have gone on to found, lead, and accelerate dozens of great businesses. Today, we are developing talent all over the world using the methods we learned and developed.
We led the 2024 Skills for Success course; we had an incredible experience and are very excited for more students in the next year!
Founders, Leaders, Curriculum Developers
Strengthening Your Application
Futures Forge helps students transform into candidates that top universities and employers seek out. Our students develop the cognitive and psychological skills that employers say are most missing, giving them a strong advantage in internship and job applications.
Admissions officers at elite universities increasingly seek out candidates who can make an impact in the world, and improve the university’s standing with the employer market. By demonstrating that you have the skills to make a big impact with an organization on day one, you will have a recruiting advantage that is tremendously unique compared to yet-another math camp.
It's more critical than ever to stand out in the college admissions process—fewer colleges are guaranteed to be around in the coming years, and you want to make sure your university still exists when you’re job-hunting.
How Futures Forge Helps College Applicants
Internship Impact: By mastering teamwork, problem-solving, communication, thinking, adaptability, and more, our students contribute immediately during internships, driving high-impact results that set them apart with employers.
University Readiness: These same skills mean students are able to take effective responsibility for managing their workload, their weekly schedule, and their study habits. Futures Forge graduates lead teams and clubs, seize research opportunities, plan in advance how to earn their major… sometimes in less than four years.
Demonstrable real-world skills, reflectiveness and hunger for feedback, maturity, motivation, and capacity for growth make the above possible. When these attributes are shared with admissions officers as part of a coherent story, they generate a massive advantage in selection.
What Students Learned: In Their Own Words
Join Upcoming Webinars
Meet founders, facilitators, and alumni at our upcoming webinars this fall. Select below which webinar you want to attend, and you’ll receive an invitation via email.
Skills for Success Course
Pre-College and Pre-Career
Boston University
Become prepared to take on the toughest challenges in your future with panache! Develop the skills that are critical to success in college and your career — and will impress the heck out of college and job recruiters.
Rapidly accelerate your development, working with exceptional peers in dynamic, challenging, and exciting projects that prepare you for a powerful college experience and a high-flying career, regardless of the role.
Don’t I Need a Brand Name Summer Program?
Generally, admissions officers at the Ivy Leagues make clear that having your own unique story and strength is critical to your application. Here’s what one of our colleagues in the college admissions consulting world said on the matter:
Big-name programs such as Harvard Summer School and CTY do not move the needle of admissions all that much. Their great value is the potential for a transformative experience which the student can write about in their essays or even better, help focus their entire college application. Futures Forge can do that just as well as those programs, by teaching real world skills, inspiring students to live up to their potential, and giving a taste of professions which might narrow down their target colleges and proposed areas of study.
Join us, stand out, and win your future.
Through hands-on challenges, presentations and feedback, reflection, and cognitive exercises, students improve their ability to perform in cognitively challenging future endeavors in school and work.
2024 students highlighted that they most improved in:
Teamwork and leadership
Complex problem-solving and critical thinking
Communication and presentation
Adaptability, motivation, and grit
Learning from giving and receiving feedback
The Course exists to give students an introduction to developing key attributes and increasing their rate of learning throughout their lives. Over these two weeks, students learn the answers to the following questions:
How does each key skill and attribute affect their performance and development?
How will they use these skills & attributes to succeed in the workplace?
What can they do in their own lives to most effectively grow stronger in these?
How can they increase their total rate of learning in any situation?
How can they iteratively explore and test what they are motivated and passionate about?
Students consciously practice and reflect on using these attributes throughout the course to accelerate their development for years to come.
What Students Learn in the Skills for Success Course
Who is Skills for Success for?
We’re looking for students who demonstrate:
Scores in the top 20% of standardized cognitive tests
A passion for learning and intellectual curiosity
Ambition to excel and lead
A collaborative mindset
Adaptability and resilience in challenging situations
A clear focus on future success and impact
Hear from International Student
Hear from Aryana
“Just do it!. You’ll learn more in 2 weeks than in 2 years of high school. You learn so many useful skills that you never learned in high school and you meet lifelong friends."
-Zeybek, S4S 2024
“This program has triggered me to grow myself. By creating an environment for innovative approaches, facilitating open feedback and by putting students in situations where they need to problem solve effectively, Futures Forge taught me so much.”
--Olivia, S4S 2024
Advice on Choosing a Summer Program
You Must Develop These Skills To Stand Out To College Admissions
You’re smart, and others are smart, too: unfortunately, the Ivy League doesn’t have enough seats for everyone who’s smart enough. To differentiate yourself, you need to take action now and demonstrate proficiency in a set of skills that will strengthen your application - and set you up for success long after.
A Guide For Young Entrepreneurs In Selecting The Best Pre-College Program
Finding a program that not only builds essential skills but also goes beyond the standard high school or college curriculum is necessary in a world that often underestimates what is needed to make a great entrepreneur.