Building Futures: How UC San Diego’s Futures Program Prepares High School Students for Career Success

When the UC San Diego Division of Extended Studies Futures Programs first launched in 2018, the goal was to do something not often attempted: give high school students access to career-readiness courses guided by industry professionals, build real-world skills, and help teenagers make informed choices about their future careers.

Seven years later, Futures has grown from a small computer science pilot to a program spanning over a dozen fields and with global reach. 

"We started the program thinking we'd focus on computer science and give high school students opportunities to learn real-world skills,” said Megan Lancaster, Assistant Director of Education and Community Outreach at UC San Diego Division of Extended Studies. "But we quickly realized there was demand in so many other workforce priority sectors. Now we have 14 pathways in the portfolio, and it's still growing.”

To understand the program and its impact, we talked to Lancaster, who managed Futures during its early years and continues to help guide its growth; Tony Mauro, a former Qualcomm engineer turned high school teacher and eventual Futures program instructor; and Dhruv Jena, a college freshman and recent Futures student who published original research on machine learning as part of his experience with the program.

These perspectives share the unique value of the program and the opportunity it can create for the future. 

These perspectives share the unique value of the program and the opportunity it can create for the future. 

Early Skill Development for Long-Term Career Development

One of the first and primary benefits of the Futures program is offering high school students their first exposure to career-readiness classes on technical subjects rarely taught in high school. That exposure can be life-changing.

"Being in these courses opens their eyes to the inner workings of important technology that they weren't exposed to before," said Mauro, who teaches Futures courses in machine learning and digital circuit design. 

Mauro, who spent 20 years in industry before transitioning to teaching, believes programs like Futures are essential because they let students test-drive career paths early. 

"These are hard subjects," he said. "If you find you don't enjoy them, that's good to know before you get into college. And if you love it, then you're ahead of the curve."

Mauro added that one of the reasons he left industry was to inspire more students to pursue technical careers. 

"I really wanted to get more kids interested in this stuff," he explained. "There's not much, if anything, at the high school level in machine learning or circuit design. Futures fills that gap."

This was exactly the case for Jena, who started both the Machine Learning and Digital Circuit Design tracks last summer. He came across Futures while searching online for advanced technical courses that his high school didn't offer. The opportunity proved transformative.

"My school only had the standard AP Computer Science classes," he recalls. "I was actively looking for more technical courses, and Futures was the only program I found that let me start from any background and still succeed.”

Reacting to Real World Needs

The Futures program was based on the needs communicated by local industry partners. 

Through ongoing conversations with San Diego area business, technology and educational communities, UC San Diego Division of Extended Studies recognized a gap in education between what was available and what was needed in evolving real-world careers. 

"We design new programs when industry experts tell us there's a need. That's the strength of Futures—it's guided by what the workforce actually requires," Lancaster said. 

Current Futures program offerings include the aforementioned machine learning and digital circuit design, as well as others like business management, front-end web development, iOS programming and robotics with JavaScript. Each subject is developed as a three-course series that begins at an introductory level and builds to advanced applications.

"The point is to expose them, equip them, and help them take the next step—whether that's university, apprenticeships, or straight to the workforce," said Lancaster.

Courses are taught online and asynchronously, with optional office hours where students can connect with instructors.

"I loved going to Tony's office hours," Jena said. “We'd talk through assignments, but also about his industry experience. He explained how important it is to keep learning about new technolog[ies] as soon as they come out. That mentorship made a big difference.”

Students can also earn UC San Diego Division of Extended Studies pre-college (90000-level) credits for each course. Some high schools and universities even accept Futures courses as elective, A–G, or CTE (Career Technical Education) credit, making Futures a recognized, transcript-worthy step toward high school graduation and college admissions.

A Program That Keeps Growing

Although Futures began as a San Diego initiative, the pandemic's shift to online delivery expanded it worldwide.

"Online turned out to be the preferred format for high schoolers," Lancaster said. "Their schedules are packed with sports and clubs. Asynchronous courses give them the flexibility to succeed."

Today, students log in from across the U.S. and abroad, including Turkey, Italy, and Indonesia. Mauro often holds office hours across many time zones: 

"Sometimes I'm on at 6 a.m. with a student in India, or late at night with someone on the East Coast. That flexibility makes the program work."

The program's popularity and success have also prompted the addition of new subjects and more advanced classes. In Fall 2025, the program is launching four new pathways:

• Advanced Digital Circuit Design
• Advanced Machine Learning
• Marketing
• Translation and Interpretation. 

The Advanced courses for digital circuit design and machine learning are direct reflections of the popularity of those subjects. “Those courses always have waitlists,” Lancaster explained. “Students kept asking for a more rigorous curriculum. So we created advanced series to meet that demand.”

Mentorship and Industry Knowledge

Another of the program's strengths is its emphasis on real-world skill development, which translates directly into career development.

"High school students often graduate without knowing where they want to go," Lancaster said. "Futures was designed to expose them to new subjects so they can decide: do I want to pursue this in college, or can I step into a career-level job right away?"

To facilitate the direct application of coursework to real-world needs, all of the courses are led by industry experts, teaching the most current knowledge and skills students will need to be successful.

Mauro's courses are a perfect example of this. 

The learnings and subject matter he includes in his machine learning course mirror the demands of real jobs, with projects ranging from simple classifiers to advanced neural networks. Students can move at their own pace, while Mauro provides individualized feedback, debugging help, and guidance through one-on-one sessions.

"It's sort of like Coursera, but with me offering additional help for them as an instructor," he said, "For students who need that interaction, it's just as effective as being in a classroom."

For Jena, the mentorship through instructor interaction with Mauro was a key benefit of the program—one that helped him make the leap from coursework to research. 

Jena's student research project focused on using recurrent neural networks to speed up the annotation of video data from the MPII Human Pose dataset. This led him to co-author a research paper on machine learning for computer vision, which was published in the Journal of Student Research – High School Edition.

"Normally, annotating video data takes hundreds of hours," he explained. "Our model did it in about five. We lost a little accuracy, but still kept it around 90 percent for the 12 major point annotations."

His involvement in the Futures program also influenced his decision to pursue a double major in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. 

"These courses exposed me to fields I didn't even know existed," said Jena. "Before the course, I had programming experience, but not the theories behind machine learning or anything like that. Futures gave me the confidence and technical skills to publish a research paper and pursue this as a major. It’s one of the best decisions I made in high school."

Building Futures

In a world where the lines between education, work, and lifelong learning are increasingly blurred, the Futures program represents a forward-looking model that blends the rigor of university study with the practicality of trade school and the adaptability of modern apprenticeships.

The result? Students who don't just imagine their futures, they build them.

Visit Futures Programs to learn more and see the full range of courses available.