What programs/activities are good for someone who wants to go into engineering or CS?

Answered

I agree with the answer about the FRC First Robotics, but if you're planning to start your own, it's better to have a larger team and more people working on fundraising/grants since attending competitions is very costly (travel fees, hotel, participating fees, transportation, etc). To get a sense of how costly it is, a team of ~50 students in a class/team at their school needs something like 100K more than the baseline funding from their school. Plus, you need people on the electrical, mechanical, and programming subsystems as well as non-technical jobs such as finances, fundraising, communications, advertising, scheduling, etc. Then, you probably need to get a teacher or adult(s) to mentor your team, plus you'd need to buy expensive materials/equipment. I'd also like to add that the Bay Area has a ton of really REALLY good teams, so it's really tough competition (something to keep in mind if you want to create your own team). Those reasons are why people usually just join their school team. Most schools in the Bay Area that I know of (public + private) have a Robotics class/team that participates in the FRC. They can reuse the materials/resources left over from last year and they have a built-in system of teams and subteams. As a sophomore myself, I know how valuable time is, so I would recommend you join your school's Robotics team if there is one.

Also, there are quite a lot of engineering/comp sci/stem courses available at prestigious colleges (MIT, Stanford, Duke, Harvard, etc) over summer that you can take. The sign-ups won't open until around winter-ish, but you can join the mailing list so you get alerts for when specific programs are open to sign up (mailing list link usually found at the webpage's footer in either the Contact or Mailing List section). In addition, if you have time, you can see if you can apply for an internship. Try looking at this link and see if you find anything interesting: https://library.fiveable.me/career/jobs-internships/companies-that-hire-high-schoolers/blog/Jan9Z7qJAsrbOCMniAD1 (or you can just search up "Tech internships for high school students" or something along those lines)

A little tip of advice I learned is to either spend a lot of time with and ask a lot of questions to your counselor or to dig around your school website. I found that my school website had tons of good "Summer Opportunities" and links to programs updated yearly that nobody ever mentioned before! Here's some of the links from my school's website:

https://precollege.nd.edu/summer-scholars/

https://summer.uchicago.edu/pre-college-students

https://www.cmu.edu/pre-college/academic-programs/computer-science-scholars.html

https://www.cmu.edu/pre-college/academic-programs/sams.html

https://www.scu.edu/engineering/beyond-the-classroom/outreach/summer-engineering-seminar-ses/

https://www.stevens.edu/admissions/pre-college-programs/summer-2022-pre-college-programs

https://sce.cornell.edu/precollege

https://learnmore.duke.edu/precollege/duke-pre-college-high-school-program

Sorry that was probably an awfully long read so here's the TLDR:

TLDR: For FRC, either have a decently sized team or join your schools team. Find tech internships. tech/engineering/CS summer camps at prestigious colleges. spend time w/counselor or explore school website

Best of luck!