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Internship Swaps?

December 27, 2009, 7:44 pm

I had an idea, and I wondered if any of you were familiar with a program like this.  I can provide a pretty decent internship job for a motivated high school student in the summer at my company.  I have a motivated high school student who is my son.  However, from a college admissions perspective, and frankly from an experience perspective, it would be better if my son worked for something other than the family business.  I wondered if there might be an opportunity for a sort of entrepreneur's internship swap, to exchange kids for the summer to work in each other's businesses. I am toying with a website idea if such a thing does not exist.

As a follow-up bleg, our family's philosophy is to try to have our son use his summers to test out potential interests to see if they are really something that interest him once he has seen the inside of it.  To that extent, he is researching summer internships in three highly diverse (to say the least) areas:

  • international affairs, particularly comparative government systems and the interactions of different cultures and governments
  • astronomy and space exploration  (greater emphasis on observation than theory)
  • sports journalism, particularly analysis and production and possibly writing rather than being a broadcast personality

Anyone who might be familiar with a summer program for incoming HS juniors is encouraged to comment or drop me a quick email with a pointer.

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Category: General Business
  • erik

    Hi,

    I would appreciate what you have written. I found one website where student does not need to work witout pay. They will get good stipend

    Visit this
    http://abroadinternship.com

  • ElamBend

    I wish I had thought of something like this in highschool; for me it was another summer in my Dad's cardboard tube factory.

    If your son cannot find anything, perhaps he could come up with his own project/organization. If he doesn't want to work independently, he could write something up and then propose it to someone in the proper field and just ask that they mentor him. One of the hard things about internships (if they are unpaid) is having something for the intern to do, if there isn't an established internship program.

  • http://www.cherrycreekmarina.com Todd Brophy

    Excellent idea. My daught interned for my Receivership Business at 22. It was not good. She shows respect and consideration for others, but cannot help but take advantage of the "Family" connection.

  • Dale

    http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/programs/descriptions/INSPIRE_Project.html
    Information on NASA INSPIRE program.
    I had one of these students work with me in 2008.

  • http://www.timworstall.com Tim Worstall

    Re sports journalism. Absolutely nothing improves your writing skills more than actually doing the writing. So if that really is an area he wants to get into then, yes, even without any mentoring or oversight, he should simply be writing sports stories.

    Try signing him up at http://www.examiner.com*. "Phoenix Sports Examiner" or some such would be a likely title for him to try and get. You're entirely on your own in terms of what you write about and so on but simply trying to piece together a story and then "publishing it" (for whatever value Examiner has as a publishing site) is going to improve skills. Comparing what you've written to what others have published (ie, cover a local game yourself and then read how the local paper has covered it) will improve things further.

    They do pay, $9 per thousand page views at present. Not a huge amount but it's possible to make more than pocket money there.

    I know, this isn't a supervised intern program but it will improve skills and also provide a source of clips for later. And as it isn't a supervised program it's possible to do this as well as something else in the summer vacation, for this can be started next week.

    * I should disclose that I write for them and make a great deal more than just pocket money there. But I'm not on a sign up bonus so think that I'm being unbiased.

  • Sukrit

    For astronomy/space exploration: I did a lot of these in HS and am now majoring in physics and astronomy at MIT. They are really great experiences, both in terms of learning and in terms of plain fun. For a rising junior, I would recommend the Summer Science Program.