Summer before senior year of high school(CS)

I’m from am ultra-competitive high school where most of the students are on pre-med tracks and are doing research at universities over the summer. I am interested in computer science, and never contacted any professors or companies for anything to do over the summer. Now, I’m nervous, since I was originally planning to go through online classes and working on coding projects all summer. I doubt I could get an internship, since even though I’m from southeast Houston, my experience programming is really only going through the Harvard CS50 online class (2/3 of it) and the Learn Python The Hard Way book. I was hoping to be able to get merit scholarships to out of state public schools so I could get out of Texas and not pay out the nose. Am I on the wrong track?

You shouldn’t worry about internships in high school - that’s a long shot, especially for CS. Employers are generally looking for actual graduates or sophomores and juniors in college to intern. Even then, there’s a lot of competition. Most positions require you to have at least a 3.5 GPA overall. However, there are only a handful of summer programs for high school students that I know of… check out NASA, Google, Microsoft, etc.

Anyways, if I was you I’d look through my college’s programming courses and see what languages they use before learning anything. That way you’re at an advantage and won’t stress in your first semesters, in case Python is not the language you will be using.

Fortunately I got very lucky and left Texas for California (don’t regret it college-wise). Contacting professors for internships or something to do over the summer is a long shot as well - not sure how many professors would “accept” or be in favor of “hiring” any high school student for an “internship” that is paid or even unpaid - most of those programs are for college students, but there are some for high school students (such as UCLA’s summer programs), although they’re pretty costly, and are not really internships, but rather activities.

I assume you haven’t applied anywhere yet, which means that chances are most of those programs/internships you’re looking for are already filled or the deadline has passed. If that’s not the case, don’t rely on getting accepted anywhere and do as much as you can to prepare for college in the meantime.

Being from the Houston area myself, I don’t think there’s really anything to do there unless you could find an oil and gas company to intern at (with lots of luck and some connections). Then there’s NASA, but I’m sure their deadline has passed already. If not, check that out.

Good luck.

I mean, I’m technically a college student since I’m in University of North Texas’ early college program, TAMS (the “competitive high school” bit I said all earlier isn’t exactly true) so at least I might have that on my side of I tried emailing professors at University of Houston (even if it were someone doing engineering or something) to ask if I could do research. I don’t know if it would be realistic or worth it.

Professors are really busy human beings - only some are actually doing research, most do it on their own (in case they are on their sabbatical or got a huge grant from somewhere), and some do it with other instructors.

Research is a strong word - it’s powerful and can mean a lot of things. In the most general case, however, I think the word means that you’ve accomplished something over a long period of time. Something like research can’t and shouldn’t be done over a few weeks.

I really don’t know whether it would be worth it or not. I’m pretty sure there are many out there looking for people to hire for some unpaid work nobody wants to do, but research… very unlikely, especially at freshman or high school level. Most of these programs are cost-related, not to mention that you’d have to pay up for a commute (in case you actually go to U of H for some internship) as well as housing (in case you live far away and can’t afford it because of the Houston traffic). There’s a lot of factors.

If you think it will help you get anywhere in life, do it.