Providing Summer Internship for College-bound Students

High school internships are a recent phenomenon that is slowly becoming a trend. For the longest time, high school students worked at restaurants, shopping malls, and similar commercial establishments, but these jobs were primarily a mechanism for the students to earn money of their own to do things without asking for money from their parents. These were also jobs that instilled an increased level of maturity in the employees (still teenagers) who were tasked with delivering a service to customers, being professional, and maintaining a schedule of activities. These positions allowed an additional way for young people to transition to adulthood, and for some, just in time for college. While delivering important life lessons, this kind of high school employment just isn’t sufficient to meet the needs of today’s college-bound students.

College-bound high school students need something more. All students have ways to differentiate themselves, e.g., grades, SAT/ACT test scores, school projects, participation in sports, and other school/club activities. However, on top of these items, there is a growing need for students to further distinguish themselves from others. The need to set oneself apart from the rest is especially important if your goal is to attend an elite college whose admission percentages are trending down to the low single digits.

Unfortunately, while most colleges offer specific programs and mechanisms to support their students’ needs by providing options, most high schools simply do not. As a result, college-bound students must find their own internship opportunities, an action that very often entails asking their parents for suggestions. This approach is both sub-optimal and extremely inefficient and, at best, limits the student’s exposure based on whom they know.

I went through the same experience when our daughter was in high school and was looking for internship opportunities. This was when a lightbulb went on in the minds of my wife and myself: There needed to be a better, more formal, and structured way to create opportunities for these students allowing them to apply for internships and be able to use their knowledge and experience to help differentiate themselves in their college applications.

This is how the Spark Summer Internship Program (www.sparksip.org) was born. The program allows its founders to exercise their passion for mentoring people of all ages into working with various entities in the greater Seattle area to provide a broad range of internship opportunities to high school students. Our vision is to connect talented high school students to work with industry experts, businesses, and academic institutions to prepare them intellectually and emotionally for the future.

Started in 2015, the program has had over 300 students apply for internship positions with more than 20 internship providers, and almost 100 internships realized. Our internship providers have primarily been a combination of university professors and Seattle-based startup CEOs. This summer, we have seen expressions of interest explode with over 600 students registering at our website! We’re projecting the number of 2021 internship positions may exceed a record 30 positions. Many of the students who’ve participated in the Spark Summer Internship Program have been accepted to some of the top colleges in the US, such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, University of Washington, and others.

Call to action: We are now actively accepting applications from high school students looking for summer 2021 internships. We are also looking for greater Seattle-area businesses to step forward with internship opportunities. To find out more, please visit our website: www.sparksip.org.