I took two courses through Summer@Brown Online the summer after my 9th grade year. Loved both, and while they didn’t award college credit, they definitely helped to shape the path I’ve taken during the rest of my time in high school. I also attribute some of my formal writing skills and good productivity habits to the experience – and I learned a ton!
Of course Summer@Brown and the Brown Leadership Institute are different programs, but there seems to be enough overlap that I feel confident saying the Leadership Institute would be a fantastic experience for a rising high school sophomore. Where the online Summer@Brown courses didn’t feel very collaborative because of the large amounts of asynchronous work, the Leadership Institute promises that students will “practice a collaborative model of leadership”. I’d trust that more for the in-person session than for the online one, but even without close collaboration with classmates, I found that the professors were accessible and the coursework (I took “Radical Social Movements” and “Law and Social Movements”) was complex and engaging.