Finding internship opportunities is always difficult – figuring out who to contact, what to say, where to look, what applications to fill, and how to fill those applications are all extremely difficult steps.
So my first piece of advice is to find a field that you would find genuinely interesting and don’t worry so much about whether that field would look good on your application and whether it fits in with the rest of your interests. The primary goal of high school internships is to determine what fields seem appealing to you, try out new things, get work experience, and learn from mentors and professionals. If you’re applying to college and say that you’re interested in medicine, it’s okay if you have a CS internship on your application, as long as the work you did was illuminating and you can express the important takeaways that you had from that experience.
Then it’s important to know where to look. If you’re possibly interested in academia and research, looking to university professors can be an amazing source of work experience and internships. It does require a lot of work to cold email several professors in the departments you are interested in, but doing so will give you the experience of learning from the process and understanding how to connect with professors and learn from their responses. Most professors probably will not respond, and the majority of those who do respond will not give you positions, but if a few do respond and offer an interview opportunity, that would be a great opportunity for you to learn from the interview process, learn about the research process from the mentor, and possibly obtain a research internship that way.
If you’re interested in this path, make sure that you’re email has the different research fields/interests that seem particularly appealing to you, and the different skills/experiences that you’ve had either in school or out of the classroom that would make you an adequate researcher and a continuous learner.
If you’re interested in something more corporate, you should probably do your best to connect with people (maybe on Linkedin) and ask for job/internship opportunities. You can ask your school counselor for advice on who to contact and different opportunities that exist, especially since your high school might be connected or receive contact emails from different employers. You should also do a deep search on google, looking at all the different companies that are interested in employing high school students, and fill out the applications for their companies. Be sure in your essays to fill out the relavent experiences that you’ve had, the things you’re interested in helping them with, the ways you think you’ll grow from the opportunity, and ways that you might be able to contribute to their work environment in the future.
Most people who are willing to take on interns at high school age are also looking back to give back to the community, especially because most high school students don’t have too much work experience or skillset. That’s why there’s no need to be too anxious or worried about the whole process because everybody who is applying for internships at a young age are mostly in the same boat – inexperienced because of their young age. That should be exciting and not nerve-racking! You have the opportunity to make mentors and learn a lot from people who are professionals in the field that you may be interested in. If you’re interested in interning for ace learning, we’d be happy to impart you with skills in educating, teaching, and writing!
If none of these work out for you, then you can also work on building your own expertise in skills. Maybe watch youtube videos on learning a new skill, learning some study habits, preparing for the next year’s class and workload, shadowing a job profession online, taking online course certifications (like AWS, Java, etc), or helping your family around the house. These are all things you can include in your college applications, so there’s no need to be focused only on getting internships for the summer.
That’s it for now, I hope that this writeup was useful and helpful for thinking some more about these things. As always, stay safe and please reach out with any questions.
Thanks!
Naman
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