Paid Internships for High School Students

[clarinets]

I am currently a junior in high school and am wondering if there are any good paying internships or research opportunities for high school students. Thanks!

 

[Vanadium 50]

Very few. Very, very few. College students are all ahead of you in line, and the liability and paperwork issues for having someone under 18 in a lab are extremely serious.

 

[turbo]

I had a paid internship offered to me when I was a senior in HS. Unfortunately, my parents had only one car, and I couldn't make the time to walk 25 miles each way to the paper mill. Many years later, my youngest nephew got an internship at that same mill, and by the time he was in the process of graduating in ChemE, he had more job-offers than he could handle.

 

[eri]

MIT has a summer internship program for high school students to get involved in research in Boston.

http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/juniors_mit_and_other_summer_p

NASA also offers internships for high school students.

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/descriptions/Students-rd.html

So does the NIH.

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/funding/training/redbook/hsnihbio.htm

It's probably too late to apply to any of them now, but maybe you can start thinking about next summer. Other than that, your chances aren't good unless you've got a strong contact at a college already. And if you did manage to get an offer over an undergrad somehow (professors are far more likely to take an undergrad, since they're paid to teach them and not you, and they have stronger math and science skills) they almost certainly wouldn't be paying you. It would be a volunteer position, and one you'd be extremely lucky to get.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Note that he said paid. Lots of places have summer programs for HS students. Very, very few of them are paid.

 

[DrummingAtom]

There were a couple of kids in my physics class last semester that did paid internships of their summer before college. I don't remember the companies but they were engineering firms. Both of them said that their programming experience played a big role, especially MATLAB.