Frequently asked questions

No. The Wang Institute for Emerging Scholars is a private, independent institute. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the University of California San Diego, Stanford University, or any other university or organization with which Professor Wang holds or has held an appointment. Institute programs are separate from his university roles.

We don’t build résumés. We build the thing résumés are supposed to show: years of persistence on one real problem, a body of work the student understands deeply, and results others can vouch for. Students who have done that have no trouble explaining it to admissions officers.

Students Professor Wang has mentored at the universities where he has served on the faculty have gone on to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, and many other institutions, as students and later even as faculty.

Young people, usually starting around grade 9 or 10 (grade 8 by invitation), who keep noticing things in the world and can’t let them go, and families ready for a multi-year commitment. About ten apprentices begin each year, and the Institute is open to students worldwide. Professor Wang meets every student, and separately their parents, before inviting anyone in.

Each apprentice works toward a substantive external milestone, chosen to fit the problem: a paper submitted to a reputable venue, a patent application prepared with a registered attorney, a solution deployed with a named community partner and real users, or an organization formally established to carry the work forward. The standard is that the work is submitted, filed, or deployed to a bar Professor Wang would put his name on; acceptance or recognition is welcome but is not the goal. Along the way, apprentices pass a series of defined milestones, from a problem dossier and defense to a build and a capstone defense. The deeper outcome is the apprentice: someone who has stayed with one real problem for years and can explain every decision they made.

Students try this all the time, and it rarely works, for understandable reasons. Faculty get many of these emails, have obligations to their own graduate students, and usually can't supervise a minor in a lab, legally or practically. Even when a spot opens up, the student often ends up on the edge of someone else's project. Professor Wang took on this work to give young people what a cold email can't: a professor whose job is to mentor them, on a problem they own, for years.

Find a real problem by spending time with the people who live it. Arrange their own meetings and conversations. Build and test their own solutions, use them, and improve them. Keep a field record of everything. Over two years that becomes a body of work and a set of relationships they own.

All mentoring is remote. Each apprentice has a monthly design review with Professor Wang and regular sessions with an associate in between.

The apprenticeship is a two-year commitment of four semesters, and every cohort starts in the fall. The project itself is meant to run for years, and apprentices may continue beyond the first two. We are currently in conversations with families and partners. To learn more, get in touch.

Associates are PhD students in top-tier research programs in the United States, selected and trained by Professor Wang. They meet with each apprentice between sessions with Professor Wang to help them prepare, keep momentum, and work through problems as they come up.

It’s Latin for “from the stars to the sun,” and it’s our motto. The student sees the stars; the mentor helps make sense of them and chart a course toward the light.