My incoming MIT freshman is working on her resume for internships. What HS achievements should go on engineering freshman resume? Obviously she does not have much of experience just couple of month of research. Should she mention her SAT and other test scores or this is irrelevant at this point? How about leadership positions and HS clubs?
Sorry if this doesn’t answer the question, but she should definitely go to her college’s career center, and attend any workshops/fairs/etc. available. I don’t go to MIT, but I had initially expected my college’s career center to offer hackneyed or cliche advice; they actually helped me a lot.
If she got into MIT she probably has a lot of impressive things she can put on there.
Thank you for reply. She is working on her resume now to bring it to career center in September. Most of internships for next year will be gone by the end of September. She had an impressive HS career, but I a little confused what she should have on her internship resume as an incoming freshman.
nothing. she hasn’t had one. 
It’s also not true that most of the summer positions will be gone by September. Many don’t even start posting until November.
Many incoming freshmen already have next year internships secured. @eyemgh
I suspect your definition of “many” differs from most of us. I’ve never known a freshman with an internship secured before starting classes unless they already have some connection to the company in question.
I don’t have visibility on personal connections, but I know students who got offered impressive internships as an incoming freshmen. Most of incoming freshmen at my D school have prior experience in research, robotics, etc.
Knowing freshmen who’ve been offered internships is in no way equivalent to most internships being gone by September. MIT has a bit of a different infrastructure than most schools when it comes to support and alumni networking to get internship placement. I’m fairly confident in actually saying hardly any Summer 2017 internships are “gone” by September.
@eyemgh here is the reply from itsv on your “Yet another, but specific, internship thread…”
MIT does seem to place more emphasis than most schools about freshmen working on internships. But, even they probably want kids to ease into things their first semester, as the transition to college can be stressful. This program begins in earnest in January of freshman year. https://gecd.mit.edu/jobs-and-internships/fasip
My kids were absolute slackers in comparison-they both worked every summer but didn’t have any major internship until after their junior year in engineering.
NASA/JPL (all the OSSI positions for that matter) applications do not open until November. Boeing is currently not open. Space X is, but only for some spots. I believe you’re misinterpreting the above post to read job posts CLOSE in September.
Thank you @sevmom
Try not to fret too much about the peers that arrive at MIT with internships for next summer. It sounds like they come through non-MIT leads. There will be plenty of campus job hunting opportunities. It looks like there is a job fair Sept 23 (I assume includes internships) - https://career-fair.mit.edu/#!/
Per resume, it seems like you could have a lot of the same kinds of things from college application days. This link includes a freshman MIT example. (It includes SAT; no GPA but Val statusl) - https://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/jobs/files/sample-resumes.pdf
Thank you so much @colorado_mom !
Internships for freshmen are actually quite rare except for ones in which you already have an “in”. SpaceX has s reputation for offering a bunch of internships (like about 700) but I also read that they had something like 14,000 applicants. I would bet that very few freshmen got internships given the pool to draw from.
Most big companies do their intern recruiting in the fall. Smaller ones often still recruit well into the spring.
When I was in a position to hire interns, my company restricted internships to rising seniors. Quite typical for a lot of big companies.
MIT has a great undergraduate research program (UROP). I took part in it when I was a student there. Worked for a well known professor doing state of the art research. Did it for credit during the term and it became my summer job (I.e. paid) for a couple of summers. Summertime at MIT can be quite pleasant as you have a lot going on in the area and no homework to bog you down.
Freshman may or may not score an internship. But they should still pursue it to at least get the practice even if it does not yield a job. Summer research is a great alternative - that’s what our son did after his freshman year at Olin.
Yes,Going to a career fair type of thing, even as a freshman does give you access to employers. Some will offer coop types of things, internships. My kids went to career fair type things for practice in the beginning more than anything. Both were offered things early on or research opportunities but we wanted them to graduate on time . A research opportunity for the summer S2 was offered did not work out as it seemed like it would be unpaid and a great paid internship came up. Your daughter has 4 years to figure this out. She really does not need to rush into anything, including worrying about her resume before she even steps on campus.
BTW, my son told me that Boeing just posted that applications for Summer 2017 will open August 28th.
Your daughter could just do a brief outline (like the ones @colorado_mom provided) and use the drop- in hours at Career Services to help her fine tune a resume. Hopefully, she is not stressing out too much over any of this .Good luck to her at MIT!
Thank you for your help @sevmom . She is very excited to attend, but at the same time is stressed out , and overwhelmed by the pool of talents in her freshman class and thinks that she is the least intelligent person in the room. Luckily half of her class thinks that they got in by mistake, so it might be a common thing. She is flying for FPOP in a week and we all hope it will work out somehow.