How would I go about finding an engineering internship for the summer? How do top companies even give high school students these opportunities? I’m a rising college freshman and I’m not sure how I would go about that. I’m going to be majoring in chemical engineering and am interested in energy sources.
Mostly they don’t. You haven’t learned any engineering yet.
I’ve heard of high school students who are only juniors getting these types of opportunities though. I met this girl who had gotten an internship at Shell as a high school junior. She even communicated with foreign companies! I was shocked that people even took her seriously. Do you have any suggestions about what I should do during the summer then? I want to do something academic and related to my intended field of study.
Ask her how she did it. She’s the exception, not the rule. Even freshmen in college have a tough time finding internships. As a ChemE junior I sent probably around 20-25 applications for this summer and got two interviews and one offer.
Google will be your best friend here. If you can’t find anything and haven’t worked anywhere before, just get some sort of summer job. You’ll learn a lot about working, make some money to pay for your exorbitantly expensive textbooks in the fall, and have experience to put on your resume. My internship will be in food manufacturing, and the interviewer said she liked that I had worked three summers at Walmart because those skills would be directly applicable to working with the people on the manufacturing plant floor.