Inside Oscar’s first high school immersion program: students reimagine provider search with AI
Through hands-on mentorship and workshops, four high schoolers got a front-row seat to the future of health tech.
Agentic coding in software engineering teams has rapidly become table stakes. But the much bigger question is, how far along is agentic coding in vastly expanding the set of people who write code, far beyond software engineering teams? It turns out that very smart high school sophomores and juniors can do today in a few days what would have taken trained engineers weeks not too long ago.
We recently launched our first High School Immersion Program, welcoming a group of sophomores and juniors into our world of health tech. The goal of the program was to not only observe, but to build. Students had one technical mentor for direct guidance and were given a problem to solve: “Build a better provider search engine for New York, using vibe-coding.”
Through daily workshops with our Engineering, Product, and Operations teams, students learned about the entire project development life cycle from ideation to execution. The program culminated in a showcase where students presented their innovative solutions to a panel of our team members.
This does not mean that software engineers are becoming obsolete tomorrow. But coding will almost certainly go the way of the spreadsheet - once used by few, trained accountants, now by pretty much everyone in every knowledge worker job. Enterprise tech stacks are by no means ready to deal with a deluge of vibe-coded applications, but if high schoolers pumping out physician search engines in relatively little time doesn’t make you think that’s coming, you’re probably not thinking far enough ahead.
Meet the Participants
Meet Siddarth, Alya, Lina and Gabriel, four students interested in careers in technology, Computer Science, and Data Science. They were tasked to build a smarter, AI-powered provider search engine, and the results were incredible. Here’s what they had to say about the program. Their responses were edited for length and clarity.
Lina
“I was immediately drawn to Oscar Health because I was interested in learning more about healthcare and technology. This program gave me that opportunity and so much more.
During the week, I got a glimpse of a professional technology space while learning about AI. I had never worked with AI to create an application before and had very limited coding experience, which made me nervous in the beginning. However, our mentor helped me every step of the way.
Working on this project was fascinating. Building an app by just typing what we wanted to the AI through prompt engineering was a concept that was hard to wrap my head around. Being exposed to how AI is starting to be used in the workforce was an experience that I really am grateful for. This opportunity has definitely helped in directing me toward a future career.”
Gabriel
“The High School Immersion program was an incredible opportunity to explore AI in computer science and experience the software development process firsthand.
Using AI to build our app taught me valuable lessons; it excelled at creating a user-friendly, modern UI but often struggled with backend development and data accuracy, sometimes making it difficult to distinguish real data from mock data. Having a mentor in software engineering allowed me to navigate some of the nuances of AI, and meeting professionals from different tech careers gave me a clear sense of direction and a better understanding of which career paths I might be most interested in. Ultimately, applying the computer science fundamentals I've learned to a real project allowed me to better visualize what a future in this field could truly look like.”
Alya
“During the program, I expanded my view of what a job in tech could be. Before, I only really thought about engineering roles in the technology sector, but I especially enjoyed participating in workshops on product management and thinking about what requirements different stakeholders need from the product.
I was able to use the information from the workshop to learn how to use AI to code a NY provider search engine. While I had used the AI software before, this time, I discovered helpful new features. We faced plenty of challenges, mostly with the amount of web scraping we had the AI do to ensure that the AI did not hallucinate with data, and constantly ran the scrapers frequently to collect meaningful data for the project.
I'm grateful to my mentors and the employees at Oscar for making this such an enriching experience.”
Siddarth
“I'm extremely satisfied with my experience, as I learned not only about the software development life cycle and technical skills like prompt engineering, but also gained invaluable insights from my mentor and even Oscar’s co-founder.
Our group was tasked with creating a fully functional provider directory using agentic AI, something most of us were unfamiliar with. With our mentor's help, we overcame blockers and saw the true potential of AI in a professional workplace. The morning workshops with different departments definitely expanded my view of future career paths, and getting to present our project and receive direct feedback from the President of Technology was an eye-opening experience. I'm very thankful for the opportunity and would consider working at a company like Oscar in the future.”
