How to Find Internships for High School Students
- Estelle Reardon
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
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High school internships offer a host of benefits to teens—they provide opportunities to explore potential career paths, develop hard and soft skills, build professional networks, and gain firsthand experience. While many students understand the rewards of internships, many also wonder how to find internships for high school students.
Why Do a High School Internship?
Among the many upsides of engaging in a high school internship is the boost it provides to your chances of admission at the nation’s best colleges. According to PRISM, a student-run consultancy at the University of Chicago, approximately three-quarters of students attending a U.S. News Top 50 university completed at least one internship while in high school.
Completing a high school internship shows colleges that you’ve explored your interests outside of the classroom and verified them with real-world experience. These experiences can serve as a differentiator in competitive college admissions and help you stand out in crowded application pools.
Having a high school internship on your resume can also make it easier to secure future opportunities, like college internships or acceptance into pre-professional societies, clubs, and organizations. These groups are a great place to meet people working at your dream career destinations and can create meaningful connections. Additionally, many students find it fulfilling to test their skills outside the academic world and contribute to problems they care about in a professional setting.
How to Find Internships for High School Students
How to find high school internships? Online search tools, blog posts, and matching programs are all effective for finding high school internships. One notable tool is StandOutSearch.
The largest free online database of high school internships, StandOutSearch makes discovering the right opportunity easy, with filters for location, field of interest, and format (in-person, virtual, or hybrid). Another useful resource is a list of summer programs and internships collected by MIT Admissions.
Family connections are another way many high schoolers obtain internships. However, keep in mind that certain types of firms—such as law firms and investment banks—usually don’t hire teen talent, since they lack the educational foundation to make significant contributions. Admissions committees know this and are skeptical of high school students who have these types of positions on their resumes.
If a family friend offers you an opportunity, make sure there are interesting projects you can tackle at your current education level (fetching coffee or organizing files will not be a very good use of your time).
Programs That Match High School Students With Internships
Below is a list of well-known programs that help match high school students with internships in their field of interest. There are a limited number of official internship programs that accept students under the age of 18 and they’re generally quite selective. Consequently, if you’re serious about securing a high school internship, you’ll want to prepare a cold outreach strategy.
Cold outreach is when you proactively contact a company or professional you have no connection with to inquire about internship opportunities. At the end of this article, you’ll find valuable information about how to create a strong cold outreach strategy for both research and traditional internships.
Ages: 15-19
Location: Virtual
Timeline: Summer, Spring, Fall, or Winter
Deadline: Various Deadlines
Whether a student is interested in the arts, business, healthcare, science, or technology, StandOut Connect facilitates virtual internship placements tailored to their career goals. The program has been featured in Forbes for linking high schoolers with real-world professional experiences.
StandOut Connect was developed with support from the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and leverages the network of StandOutSearch (the largest free database of teen internships) to help gifted high schoolers get a jumpstart on their careers.
Ages: 16-18
Location: Remote
Timeline: School Year or Summer
Deadline: Various
The U.S. Department of State’s Pathways Internship Program includes two pathways:
Internship Experience Program (IEP)
Internship Temporary Program (ITEP)
Both programs are open to U.S. citizens and welcome high school students to apply. These paid opportunities are a great chance to explore careers in the federal government and an ideal fit for students interested in government, politics, and international affairs.
Ages: Juniors and Seniors
Location: San Francisco, CA
Timeline: Summer
Deadline: February 16
The City and County of San Francisco offer a variety of internship opportunities for high school students in a number of fields. A few areas where students might intern include:
Airport
City Attorney
Department of Children, Youth and Their Families
Department of Elections
District Attorney
General Services Administration
Office of Economic Workforce Development
Public Utilities Commission
Public Works
Interns work 20 hours a week for eight weeks over the summer. Students must be San Francisco residents or attend school in San Francisco to participate.
Ages: 17 and 18
Location: Across the U.S.
Timeline: Summer
Deadline: Early January
The Emma Bowen Foundation endeavors to help students flourish on their path to professional growth. They help match students with opportunities across interest areas such as journalism, arts, web development, engineering, sales, business, technology, and more.
Participants engage in a paid internship, connect with professionals and industry executives, and receive one-on-one mentoring and coaching. They also gain access to a network of peers and partners, along with professional development workshops.
Ages: 14-17
Location: San Antonio, TX
Timeline: Summer
Deadline: April 3
This exciting summer work program places both middle and high school students in paid, part-time internships across San Antonio. Participants build soft skills and college and career readiness while gaining real-world experience.
A broad spectrum of businesses host interns, ensuring a range of opportunities are available. Interns work a maximum of 20 hours a week, and internships last a total of 120 hours.
How to Build a Resume in High SchoolÂ
Whether you’re applying to official high school internship programs or launching a cold outreach strategy, you’re going to need to build a high school resume. Our guide and template provide a great starting place for building an internship-winning resume. The University of Chicago’s resume toolkit is also an invaluable resource—bookmark it and consult it as you build and refine your resume.
When crafting your resume, it’s especially important to quantify and specify all of your accomplishments to highlight the impact you made. Reference statistics such as the number of people you impacted, the amount of money you raised, or the extent to which you improved on a personal goal.
Here are some important rules to keep in mind when building your resume:
Keep it concise:Â Your resume should be no more than one page while you are in high school and during most of your early career
Stay organized: Present information in reverse chronological order
Follow proper formatting: Don’t begin bullets with I, use complete sentences, or add periods to the end of bullets
Use action verbs:Â Start bullets with action verbs and ensure consistent and appropriate tenses
Show your work:Â If you are looking for a coding role, you should link your GitHub profile to your resume
Proofread: Your spelling and grammar should be perfect
Readable:Â Limit your resume to a single page with traditional margins and font no smaller than 11pt, Times New Roman
Protect personal information:Â Exclude any personal information that you feel uncomfortable sharing
It’s tempting to fill multiple pages with every award you have ever won or class you have taken; however, most employers won’t spend more than 30 seconds reading a resume. Less is more when drawing the reader’s attention to the most relevant aspects of your profile. In fact, older adults can find it somewhat inappropriate when a high school student’s resume is longer than their own.
Show your resume to your parents or teachers to get a second opinion and iterate before sending it out to opportunities. Once your resume is ready, you will be well on your way to finding an internship!
Cold Outreach Strategy for High School InternshipsÂ
Many people—both students and professionals alike—find cold outreach scary, but the tips below make the process less daunting.
How to Find Companies to Reach Out to for a High School Internship
You can use LinkedIn to find small companies where you can help with a variety of duties, for example:
Administrative support
Coding
Content/grant writing
Event support Graphic design
Reports and presentation preparation
Social media
Try to make personal connections with the professionals you contact—mention shared hometowns, hobbies, or a mutual passion for a sports team. If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, now is a great time to create one and start connecting with family members and friends to build your network. If you have a resume, you can adapt most of it to your LinkedIn profile. Alternatively, you can ask a parent or teacher if it is all right to use their LinkedIn account to search for companies with potential internship opportunities.
Exercise caution when contacting professionals you don’t know. It’s always safest to interview or meet virtually!
How to Find Professors to Reach Out to for a High School Research Position
To find potential research opportunities, use online university faculty directories to identify professors in your field of interest. Remote research positions are rare for high schoolers, seeing that they’re typically needed to assist with hands-on lab work like equipment maintenance or cleaning glassware.
One exception is computational research. These positions generally require basic coding skills, which you can learn in a few months, for free, with resources like Coursera’s Python for Everybody and R Programming.
As you start sending emails, keep it local; professors are far more likely to open doors for students who live in the community.
How to Structure and Send Outreach Emails
Set a goal of sending at least 50 internship inquiries as part of your cold outreach strategy. When emailing potential internship providers, include a Google link to your resume and ensure its settings allow anyone with the link to view its contents. Links are more effective than PDFs and Docs, which can trigger spam filters and hinder deliverability.
Make sure that your resume includes any relevant work experience and include a portfolio or GitHub profile of your work samples—like a website you designed, social media account you manage, blog you’ve written, or flyer you created.
Email Template for Finding a High School InternshipÂ
If you are unsure how to structure your outreach emails to potential internship providers, here are some basic templates you can customize to your needs.Â
Template for Finding an Internship
Subject: Student Reaching Out
Dear Mr./Ms.____,
I hope you are having a great day! My name is [your name], and I am a rising [grade] at [your school]. I read about your company on LinkedIn and found the concept quite interesting. For context, [briefly state how the company relates to your interests or experience].Â
I was wondering if you might be looking for interns. I know I would have a great deal to learn from working with you, and I would love to contribute in any way I can. I have included my resume here. Thanks so much!
Sincerely,Â
[Your name]
Template for Finding a Research Position
Subject: Student Reaching Out
Dear Professor/Dr. ____,
I hope you are having a great day! My name is [your name], and I am a rising [grade] at [your school]. I recently read your paper on [restate the abstract] in [name of publication] and was quite intrigued by [part you found interesting]. I was wondering if I might be able to intern for you over this summer. [Elaborate on your relevant skills and experience and why you are passionate about the field].Â
I have included my resume here. Thanks so much!Â
Sincerely,
[Your name]
Conclusion
Whether you are applying to well-known high school internship programs or launching a cold outreach strategy, tenacity is critical to your success. Securing professional opportunities in high school is challenging and requires a great deal of persistence and optimism. We promise that if you keep trying, you’ll find an opportunity that is worth your effort.
If you are looking for more official programs, check out StandOut Connect’s blog, which is home to an abundance of articles focused on opportunities specific to your fields of interest or geographic location.