Campus over the summer is full of younger students practicing their athletic skills and taking summer quarter classes, but few can say they engineered a solution to heart disease.

Educational Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) student Josh Burak is one of those few. In his three weeks at Stanford, the rising high-school senior constructed an electric “catheter” with which to identify problem areas on an electronic heart, and then repair.

“The first week and a half we learned all the physics — tension, force, buckling, and the next week we started putting it together, building the catheters with the electrical circuitry, and making everything work,” Burak said.

Burak’s class, Introduction to Bioscience and Biotechnology, is one of 23 offered during EPGY’s Summer Institutes. Drawing upon the humanities and sciences, the program offers two three-week and one four-week session to students in grades eight through 11. Tuition is $3600 per three-week session and $4700 for the four-week session.

“A lot of [the program] is academic enrichment,” said Director of Summer Institutes for EPGY Rick Sommer. “It’s for kids who are not challenged in their regular schooling and want to learn more. We get very bright students; we’re a selective program and we want to give them a taste of academic content and academic experience they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Students in the Summer Institutes select among all available classes in application for the program, but only take one. Although admission rates vary by class, Sommer said the program accepts approximately two thirds of applicants. The number may be seen as high, but Sommer said the program has very focused, private marketing, lessening the applicant pool to only the most gifted and enthusiastic.

“We’re looking for students who are academically talented and motivated,” Sommer said. “We’re looking for people who are coming here for the right reasons. They receive no credit or grade for their work, so it’s purely academic enrichment.”

EPGY applications include the typical transcript, standardized test scores, teacher recommendation, work sample and personal statement. With such high expectations, only the most passionate make it into the Summer Institutes, Sommer said.

Rising high-school senior Caroline Riedel came to EPGY after receiving an e-mail from the program. She was interested in getting a better sense of engineering, her father’s profession.

“It was really cool to get a sense of engineering here,” Riedel said. “I found I really like it and have a better sense of what I want to do in college.”

As gifted students, participants do in fact engage in college-level material. Quantum mechanics, relativity, particle physics and advanced math courses, including number theory, are all taught. The humanities are not disregarded however, as popular classes such as creative and expository writing and art history account for around forty percent of the program, according to Sommer.

Leading such advanced coursework are Stanford professors, but assisting them are (most often) Stanford undergraduate and graduate students acting as both residential staff and TAs. Classes (or sections of classes) average 15 students with an average staff-student ratio of one to four.

Graduated senior Pablo Abad-Manterola assists with the Introduction to Engineering course, and has enjoyed working with students on robotics projects, as well as fostering a social environment.

“Here they get a glimpse of the college experience, and what it’s like finding a group of friends,” he said. “I hope they take away wide range of things; since we have students from places like China and India, I hope they learn as much about each other as they learn in class.”

Sommer shares the sentiment. Despite the very structured days of morning class followed by a three-hour study period, and coordinated extracurricular activities in the afternoon and evening, he hopes each student “leaves here saying, ‘I haven’t learned so much in three weeks before,’ and ‘I had such a great time.’”

“We want every kid to have a challenging experience, but we don’t want to overwhelm them, and we also want them to make friends that they keep in touch with for years to come,” he said. “We want this to be an overall rewarding experience, academically and socially.”

The second (three-week) and third (four-week) EPGY Summer Institutes sessions began Monday, with students living in the Cowell and Lake Houses. For more information on the program, visit http://epgy.stanford.edu/summer/institutes.html.