Internship opportunities for data science as a graduating high schooler?
Would it be possible to get a data science internship as a graduating high schooler for this summer? I figure it would mostly be a learning experience for me and I wouldn’t expect to be paid. I’m familiar with the basics of python but I’m still learning. How would I go about looking for these internships, if they would even exist in my situation? Would it even be possible to try and get something in my situation?
Posted May 6, 2018, 6:56 PM UTC
31
Just try asking, especially at tech startups offices near you. Drop by meetups in your city even if you don't really understand everything that's going on, talk to people, ask to see how things work in the business and how they solve problems. Some places have down time between milestones and are happy to guide new blood, especially that young.
Internships don't exist for high schoolers in data science and that's a massive plus for you because whoever you ask will have no preconceptions. Go in, suck everything up and ask all the questions, you might even help them uncover blind spots.
Alternatively, if you're confident in your own skills to some degree, just talking to local small business or even local government for the chance to look at their data and try to find something useful for them, that would impress. Your corner bakery or barbershop, look at their books and how they do accounting and business planning, how they could be doing it better. In cases like this they actually have to be interested in looking at data themselves or it's too tall an order for you. I'd say understand your statistics fundamentals, how to frame questions, draw some plots. Don't even try to use some highfalutin NN model, save that for college.