To Internship or Not to Internship

Hello everyone,

My name is Kyle, and i am currently a Sophomore High school Student in Maryland. My dream school is JHU for their pre-med school. In reality, i know this is currently out of my reach. During Freshman year, i was not apart of as many, or any, clubs. I also finished the year with a cumulative GPA of 3.74, and top 16 percent of my class. I realize this is not enough, so this year, i made some changes. I was the only sophomore to take the AP Biology course they offer (which i excelled in), joined the science Olympiad team (which im now the vice president of), joined a clay club, joined the National Science Honor Society, and started working on my own club (a compost program for the school). This year in Maryland, grades are pass or fail, so my GPA will not be affected. So next year i am taking almost all of the highest class levels i can find. I realize that getting good grades is critical to even having a shot at JHU. My psat score was 1290, which i hope to bring up to hopefully 1450 at least.

JHU, Harvard, and Brown are all offering programs this summer. The only problem is, which my other commitments to the school, i wont be as focused. Additionally, we are not the most wealthy family. In order to do an internship i would need to skip our yearly 2 week vacation and use my portion for the program. Do you think its worth doing the summer program offered by one of these top colleges? Any other opinions?

If the programs are pay-to-play, then absolutely not. They are viewed by those adcomms as fancy summer camps. Yes, you do real things, and no, they are not a a waste of time- but it will give you no bump at all in admissions.

DO find something to do this summer that is meaningful or important in your life. That might be paid work, to save for college. That might be doing something to make your community a better place. It could be intensive training in a sport or activity that is important to you. That might be helping a teacher at school prep materials for the autumn. It could be anything - just do something.

Also: do yourself an enormous favor: reconsider JHU for pre-med. It is a great school, and it might be just the school for you. BUT…it might not be. If pre-med is what you truly, deeply want JHU is the hard way to get there. Your med school apps gets assessed for MCAT and GPA automatically- and if you don’t have the #s, you get cut, without anybody seeing your name, the name of your college, your major- anything.

Go ahead and keep it in the mix- but add places to your list that you can also love, and where you are likely clearly in the top 25% of the cohort.

Wow thank you this was very helpful,

There seems to be alot of Ivy schools offering “pay to play” programs… Iv had alot of difficultly finding one that im eligible for this summer.

I am working on a write up for a pretty large independent lab iv been conducting, so maybe ill just focus on that.

Do you know of any programs interships or programs that would be beneficial? I saw a statistic somewhere that 98 percent of people in JHU interned under someone, shadowed someones job, etc but i cant find any im eligible for.

you are a sophomore & probably on the shy side of 16- there are lots more options summer after jr year- start looking in December.

Also, I would be v sceptical that 98% of entering 1st years at JHU have done internships- it’s not an option for too many kids, for all kinds of reasons

Stop looking for ways to impress an AO, and focus on what is true to you! There is no magic formula. Read this:

https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/applying_sideways/

It’s going to be very hard to find an internship for this summer anyway, given how things have been shut down because of the Coronavirus. Many college kids have lost internships this summer. It’s going to be much harder for a high school kid to get anything.

Yes, that sounds more like a statistic belonging to current students, as a vast majority of undergrads have/will do research or internships under the university.

If it helps, I did not have any internships – in fact, only a few of my incoming freshman friends did do internships. Like collegemom said, focus on what you want to do and what feels right. While it sounds cliche, Hop’s student body is almost full of students who pursued what they wanted to in high school, and each student’s passion about whatever they did caught the eyes of the admissions officers.

I would recommend spending part of coronacation studying for the SAT/ACT/other standardized testing. While I know many students who have relatively low scores, it does help a lot during the admissions process to have a score above the average of students admitted previously. I personally had a 35 on the ACT, if it helps.

LOL “tacky” is not a metric that I have ever seen used on internships / ECs

There is no magic number: plenty of students get in with 0 ,1,2,3…etc, and similarly, a dozen random internships won’t impress on it’s own.

What matters is how they fit into your larger narrative: how / why did you choose those internships? what did you do with that experience? how has it affected subsequent choices and actions (towards OR away! you can learn what you don’t like just as much as you can learn what you do like).

Go read the MIT link above. Competitive college admissions is not quite the box-ticking exercise that you might think!

Please start your own thread on this topic. You are hijacking another user’s thread, and this thread is from May 2020.
Closing.