Internships and summer opportunities
Students looking for internships (Illustration by Jungyeon Lee, The Puma Prensa)
By Jungyeon Lee, graphics editor
As students prepare for their junior and senior year, they might want to consider fitting an internship into their schedule. Summer internships are popular at Maria Carrillo High School because they showcase students’ passion and intellectual curiosity in a particular field.
Internships are relatively scarce for high school students; however, a few companies in the area provide the opportunity to select candidates. Ceres Community Project is planning to offer the Healthy Eating Community Educator Internship starting June 13, 2023 and ending around March 2024. The internship is paid and is different from the volunteering program in that there is more responsibility and a higher number of weekly hours. The focus is on training 12 high school interns in nutrition, culinary, and garden skills, while also having them teach healthy eating classes in schools and libraries in the community. According to Sara McCamant, the garden and youth program manager, Ceres is “looking for students from a diversity of high schools who have a passion for health and nutrition and want to teach kids and peers in the community.” Interns need to be 16 years of age or older in June of 2023 and able to get to the Sebastopol and Santa Rosa sites. Ceres will be accepting applications in April and early May.
Kaiser Permanente is offering LAUNCH, a paid summer internship held in the Kaiser building in Santa Rosa. Interns will get paid minimum wage to work from Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., for most of summer break. Juniors are prioritized, but sophomores are also welcome to apply. Applications are due in late December every year. According to Senior Riya Ramakrishnan, she worked in the lab and the blood drop clinic as one of the interns for the summer of 2022.
In the summer following Ramakrishnan’s sophomore year, she participated in Center for Disease Control Museum Disease Detective Camp, which is a program in Atlanta educating high school students in various health-related topics like public health interventions, disease outbreaks, and school wellness programs, with topics varying slightly from year to year. The program was moved online because of the pandemic, letting her spend the duration of the internship inside her home. Before she attended the CDC public health museum, she was very committed to the pre-med path, but the program gave her exposure to other career paths to also consider. Despite getting hands-on experience in medicine by participating in these internships, she felt that “sometimes short term internships can be really hard to actually gain enough experience, and you feel like you want to spend more time there to really gain a better understanding of what you're doing.”
Danya Ali, a junior, interned in a research lab at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park during the summer of 2022. Ali is planning to go into the STEM field, particularly engineering. “I found that I really enjoyed certain parts of the experience more than others. For example, I thought the differences between the microscopes and the evolution of microscope technology [was] very interesting as well as the software used to develop images from microscopes.”
EnergyMag is a sustainable environment nonprofit that offers a limited number of virtual internships. According to its website, the interns “enjoy flexibility in fitting the internship experience into their busy personal and professional lives, since work can often be completed evenings and on weekends.” The student will be asked to research and analyze a specific company, technology, or narrow market. The internship is year round, and open to all grade levels.
According to Joy Schermer, chemistry teacher, most people usually get their first internship by getting introduced to someone by a family member or even by cold-emailing organizations. A tip to getting an internship from Schermer is that you shouldn't ask someone if they have an internship because they will answer in a yes or no. Instead, you should ask them about how one can get an internship in their field which gives them room to explain.
If an internship is not a possibility, there are other summer programs that may be good alternatives in that they can indicate interest, but the experience tends to be more educational than focused on work experience. For example, Ricardo Bolanos, a junior, attended the Brain Camp at University of California San Francisco during the summer of 2022. Interns had the opportunity to dissect human brains and listen to lectures from neurosurgeons and neurologists as well as other types of doctors. “What I liked about it is that it confirmed to me that I want to go into neurosurgery one day,” said Bolanos. However, due to the camp’s location, Bolanos had to commute to San Francisco and back every day for the week. The program is for current high school sophomores or juniors. Applications open early December and are due around March.
Internships are an alleyway to discover new opportunities and gain valuable experience.