<p>It's a research internship. I'm going to be a freshman in high school next year, so it's a pretty nice opportunity considering my age. Thing is, it's 45-60hrs/week, plus 3 weekends per month. Pretty intense.
Also, I'll probably be working with small animals, something which i'm not entirely thrilled about. also, the field is interesting but it's not my main field of interest. it's at a really good university (think HYP), but the long hours are kind of a turnoff....I mean, I'm not even in high school yet, i would like to relax a bit this summer too.
the alternative:
an unpaid part time job at a local company, like 6-8 hours a week starting in july. i'll do cell culture, learn some basic assays and she will give me a letter of recommendation at the end. schedule is flexible.</p>
<p>There are some other things going on, too - I contacted another lab which is pretty much exactly my main field of interest, and they expressed some interest in me and said they would get back to me in a few weeks (which should be around now). If they accepted me, I would almost definitely choose them, given a bit of flexibility so I could also do the internship at the company.</p>
<p>The objective for me is a science fair project, and the PI from the first lab (45-60 hrs/week) said that I could most likely get a project out of it. A high school intern who worked at his lab a couple years ago got a decent project out of it (state fair, not ISEF though), as well as a Nature publication.</p>
<p>Another complication is that the research project I'm working on (the background behind it is very complicated...but let's just say that i have to finish it, no matter what) currently still isn't finished, and it will most likely go into the summer....that's one of the main reasons why doing internship #1 will be tough. I'll have no extra time to finish the project I'm currently working on...which in itself I guess could potentially be a project I could use for 9th grade science fair, as it's fairly advanced.</p>
<p>Ideally I want to do several other things this summer - learn some programming languages, take some fencing classes, take some online community college classes, hang out with friends, etc. I definitely wouldn't be able to do all (maybe not any) of these things if I accepted this internship.
So....my main question is, what do you guys think about the first internship? Should I do it?</p>