The Graduate Summer School on Applied Mathematics is an interdisciplinary elite training program for excellent graduate students in China. It has been successfully executed 15 years since 2002, which has cultivated a lot of aspiring young students and teachers interested in applied mathematics. Now it gets well-known for its wide influence in Chinese universities. The proposal to start the Applied Mathematics Summer School was initiated by Profs. Weinan E (Princeton Unversity), Pingwen Zhang (Peking University), Shi Jin (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Fengshan Bai (Tsinghua University). The aim of the summer school was to innovate the lagging education on applied mathematics in China during that time. At the very beginning, 4 courses were carefully designed, which include the Applied PDE, Advanced Numerical Analysis, Asymptotic Analysis and Applied Stochastic Analysis. In later years, the summer school courses were extended to cover scientific computing, mathematical physics, partial differential equations and statistical sciences every year. In each summer, three or four renowned international or domestic scholars were invited to open short-term courses on the corresponding frontiers of applied mathematics to selected graduate students in China. These speakers include Profs. Weinan E (Princeton and Peking University), Pingwen Zhang (Peking University), Jinchao Xu (Penn State University), Shi Jin (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Andrew Stuart (Caltech), David Cai, Eric Vanden-Eijnden (NYU, Courant Institute), Jack Xin and Hongkai Zhao (UC Irvine), et al. They brought not only the cutting-edge interdisciplinary research topics but also grandly new research styles and ways of thinking. Each year, the summer school recruits about one hundred students, and it has greatly impacted the applied mathematics community in China. Many domestic and international young scholars grew from this activity. They include Profs. Pingbing Ming (Chinese Academy of Sciences, NSFC Distinguished Young Scholars Award), Jun Hu(Peking University, NSFC Distinguished Young Scholars Award), Tiejun Li (Peking University, NSFC Excellent Young Scholars Award), Zhongyi Huang (Tsinghua University, NSFC Excellent Young Scholars Award), Yan Xu (University of Science and Technology in China, NSFC Excellent Young Scholars Award), Xingye Yue (Soochow University), Jianfeng Lu (Associate Professor in Duke, Sloan fellowship), Lin Lin (Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley), Xiuyuan Chen (Gibbs Instructor in Yale), and Xu Yang (Associate Professor in UCSB) et al. With such achievements, it is appropriate to say that the Applied Mathematics Summer School has become one indispensable part of the applied mathematics education in China.