<p>Fireandrain - I’ve been reviewing some of the other posts on this site concerning Discovery Internships and how it is “evaluated” by college admissions officials. You’ve taken the position, same as many other posters on this forum, that “since you are paying for…an internship…all that experience says…to schools is that your parents have money.” This is certainly a valid assumption, but there is a common misconception about the way participants in Discovery Internships could or should represent their internship experience on a college application. Here’s the reality: </p>
<p>You don’t need to specify on your college applications how you acquired your internship experience. Would a student that lined up an internship through his or her parents specify on their college application that they got the internship through mom or dad? I don’t think so. We don’t tell our participants to put Discovery Internships on their college application - we tell them to put their specific internship. After all, they’re the one who successfully completed the internship; we just helped them get it. I suppose, for most high school students, the tendency is to focus on “getting in,” whether to a college, an internship, a club, or whatever. But in the real world, no one really cares about whether you got into a particular school or job - they only care about what you did there. If you do an internship in high school and spend a few weeks or months filing papers and doing meaningless administrative work, no college admissions office is going to be particularly impressed. We help student’s acquire meaningful professional experience that informs their decision-making about where and why they want to go to a particular school, and that’s what helps them “stand out in the college application process.” </p>
<p>I’ve copied some of the response above from another post I made on CC here: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/summer-programs/1089299-discovery-internships-anyone-have-experience-them.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/summer-programs/1089299-discovery-internships-anyone-have-experience-them.html</a></p>
<p>I certainly don’t want to diminish the value of your suggested alternatives (getting a job or volunteering). These are both great free or paid ways to spend the summer. As an organization that is built on the fundamental belief that there is a very real educational value to work experience as a high school student, we strongly endorse the pursuit of any work experience, whether in a “conventional summer job” or an internship. But I think most people can appreciate that the experience of interning in a professional field is going to be more enriching than a typical summer job. If this wasn’t the case, we probably wouldn’t have dozens of partnerships with educational non-profits and thousands of individual educators that believe in our program and the value of career-focused experiential learning. Is it necessary to do an “internship program” such as ours to acquire that experience? That’s a much more debatable point and not one that I’m going to address, because obviously we have a biased perspective. However, to tie together two of your recommendations (“If you want to…stand out for college admissions, then get a job. If you want a really cool summer experience in England…then do one of those programs.”), I can’t help but point out that our London Program checks off both of those boxes. It’s too bad that you don’t see the value in the experience, but many people do. Of course, if as you suggest, the original poster would be better of simply donating that tuition money to a good cause, well, we’re not going to dispute the value in that. You might be interested in learning more about our philanthropy at [Scholarships</a> : Discovery Internships](<a href=“http://www.discoveryinternships.com/scholarships]Scholarships”>http://www.discoveryinternships.com/scholarships)</p>
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<li>Discovery Internships</li>
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