The BAC Pre-College Programs Introduce High Schoolers to Design Thinking and Career Pathways

It's 2pm at the BAC on a sticky July afternoon. Inside the school's Summer Academy studios, high school-aged students lie on their stomachs on the floor building models, while others draft by hand.

It’s tradition. For the last 51 years, Boston Architectural College has been inviting local high school students onto its urban campus to gain early access to a sector that was once notoriously elite. Many of them have gone on to study design at the BAC or further afield and to become design professionals themselves.

BAC Director of Pre-College Programs Dragana Bogavac, MDS-SD’14, watches as each year, the students first enter the studios, barely making eye contact with one another. "But as the work starts to get made, they start to come out too. Entering week three, their models are out on the tables, there are pieces of paper balled up or cut up on the floor, and a bunch of people sharing ideas or troubleshooting as they work.”

"By offering an introduction to design thinking foundations, hands-on experiences, and projects, the program really helps students immerse themselves in the design mindset," she said.

In 2025, nearly 200 students participated in one or more of the three course options over six rigorous weeks, earning up to six college credits in the process. It was a team effort. Through partnerships with the City of Boston’s SuccessLink program many of them were paid to learn, while the YMCA offered meals. Local studios with BAC alums who now work in partner firms like Gensler stepped in to offer site visits and lectures.

Summer Academy - Global

This year, the popular pre-college program also first opened its virtual doors to students from around the world, ranging from rising freshmen to recent high school graduates.

In the morning, Dragana and her teaching assistants (all of whom are current design undergraduate or graduate students themselves) facilitated Summer Academy - Global. This online course introduced 87 teenagers from around the world to the foundations of design and architecture. Before the class began, participants received a "studio in a box" in the mail, containing everything they needed to learn basic design principles, from drafting by hand to designing and building models.

"To be in the studio with students who are in Uzbekistan, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia is so rich–we see different ways in which students from different backgrounds view the built environment, and then get to see them collaborate virtually. It is truly a global community," Dragana explained.

The Urban Design Program

Meanwhile, on campus at the BAC, Urban Design and Planning Studio (UDP) students came to study in the mornings. UDP students work on a Boston-based project, first presenting ideas to their faculty and guest critics in a Shark Tank-like competition. Students vote on which project they would like to pursue as a group. Then the cohort conducts a site visit, creates a comprehensive proposal, and ultimately presents their model and ideas to the City of Boston Planning Department at City Hall, their "client" and a BAC Pre-College key partner.

Jean Morales, a rising junior at the Boston Arts Academy, is one of the UDP Fellows, students who are paid to learn through a BAC partnership with the City of Boston's SuccessLink program. As an actor, Jean became involved in set design. He developed an increasing interest in how the stage layout can impact productions. As a resident of Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston where he doesn't always feel safe, creating a design for his own bedroom that transformed it from "a blank slate to my comfort zone" with warm gray walls confirmed a deep interest in pursuing a career in design.

Jean said, "My favorite thing about the program is how interactive it is. We talk about Boston spaces and their design history and then get to actually visit them in person." The week before, his cohort had made their first site visit to South Boston to the space that they had voted to work on for their final project.

"It was an extremely barren green space near the Reserve Channel, and there were more geese than people there at the time."

Jean is passionate about developing a model that can transform the site into a community meeting place.

Summer Academy - Boston

The lessons taught in Summer Academy Global mirrored those taught each afternoon at Summer Academy - Boston in Introduction to Design Studies, a course that UDP students are also required to take.

Summer Academy Boston begins with an introduction to design principles essential for establishing a solid foundation. "We tell the students that we come back to these as designers for the rest of our lives, and that's when they get really engaged in learning," Dragana said. Then students acquire analog skills, meaning they get to try their hand at drawing, watercolor, and representational skills.

Like any other architecture program, they hold desk crits, one-on-one meetings between instructors and students to discuss their work on a project in progress and to solicit help and feedback. The last few weeks are dedicated to working with modeling software and collaborating as a cohort to complete a final group project, from site visit to model.

The 2025 Summer Academy students' final project involved making a pavilion on the Charles River Esplanade. It's bee-themed (which coincidentally, is also the BAC mascot). It required the students to model the architecture, but also to consider the local ecology of Back Bay.

Summer Wu, a Summer Academy student, said, "We did some site research and visited. The entire design is inspired by bees, and you can interpret this theme either metaphorically or literally. We also get to decide on all the materials. It's fun but also a big challenge for me because I've never gone through the design process before from beginning to end."

A rising sophomore at Newton North High School, Summer is part of her school's Career Technical Education program, which allows her to specialize in architectural and mechanical drafting and gain skills in high school.

When her teacher recommended the BAC Summer Academy to expand upon her studies, Summer applied and was accepted. She relished taking the T home from class each day and feeling like she was part of the city as well.

"I really like how we get to try out the things we learn after each lecture," Summer said. The previous week, Chala Hadimi, the BAC's Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs, gave a lecture on ordered systems – or the different ways architects can organize their materials and concepts –and afterwards, Summer and her peers returned to their studio to experiment with creating a block model for ordering data.

"One of the things that excites me about potentially going into the field of architecture is that I like the idea of being able to turn something in my brain into something that I can see in the real world in 3-D," Summer said.

Building a future in design

Preston Tran, an alum of the 2022 Summer Academy and UDP through the SuccessLink Earn & Learn program, is now a rising junior at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University and relished his experience as a 2025 teaching assistant.

As a kid growing up in Dorchester, an urban neighborhood in Boston, he spent tons of spare time watching HGTV. Except, he was doing anything but chilling. He was imagining a career for himself in design.

In 2022, Preston was entering his senior year and beginning to think about college applications. He wanted to study something design-related but wasn't sure exactly what. He enrolled at both Summer Academy and UDP to get a feel for what it would be like to become an architect.

"I'd never met an architect before Summer Academy, but by the end of the program I was sure that I wanted to become one," Preston said. "This program and the support I was given helped me to realize that becoming an architect is the right path for me to pursue. Going on field trips to design firms and meeting professionals and seeing their projects was formative."

He was also deeply influenced by his teaching assistant, who was in college studying to be an architect, and gave him advice about applying and building a portfolio.

Most high school students have never spent time in a college environment, let alone at a design school in the city, and Preston was no exception.

"This was also my first college experience. Because the BAC is small, it feels like a tight-knit community. This experience prepped me for college, and it made my transition to architecture school easier–even though design programs are notoriously hard," he said.

Preston jumped at the chance to return to the BAC as a Summer Academy teaching assistant. This full-circle moment felt meaningful.

Now, he's the one supporting the next generation of students, reassuring them that they have what it takes to apply and get into design school, too.

At the end of the summer, Preston reflected, "I was surprised by just how much the students grew. My group is on the quieter side, and at first, it was hard to get them to engage. Now they're designing and using programs like Rhino independently, working collaboratively, and taking time after class, even when the program is over, to stay behind and work on their models. They are doing this all on their own."

Registration is now open for the 2026 BAC Summer Academy - Boston, Summer Academy - Global, and Urban Design and Planning Studio!