Summer engineering camps at university campuses have become a popular option for high schoolers this year, and beyond the fun of building bridges out of popsicle sticks or programming a small robot, they’re quietly one of the more useful career exploration tools available to teens. A one or two week camp is a low-stakes way to test out an interest before committing years of coursework and tuition dollars to a specific engineering path.

The value isn’t really about the specific skill taught that week. It’s about giving a student direct exposure to what engineers actually spend their time doing, which is often quite different from what a teenager imagines. A camp focused on mechanical design, for instance, might reveal that a student loves the hands-on building portion but finds the math-heavy stress analysis tedious, or the reverse. That kind of specific, personal information is difficult to get from a career quiz or a single conversation with a relative in the field.

These programs also tend to expose students to the different branches of engineering side by side, civil, electrical, mechanical, computer, biomedical, in a way that a single high school class rarely does. A student who assumed “engineering” meant one thing often leaves camp with a much more specific sense of which branch actually matches how they like to think and work.

For families weighing whether a summer camp is worth the cost and time, the honest answer is that it’s less about resume building and more about information. A week spent discovering that a field isn’t the right fit is arguably just as valuable as a week spent confirming that it is, since either outcome saves a student from guessing during a much more expensive college decision.