10 Business Internships for High School Students
If you are in high school and looking to do a business internship – we have a solid list of internships for you that you should consider.
It is a common mistake to assume that business internships strictly correspond with the financial sector or specific industries. However, business internships can be quite versatile and dynamic, and add positively to your profile as a high school student. They can entail similar skill sets, yet cover a broad range of career and industry norms.
Participating in an internship as a prospective business student can offer valuable exposure and opportunities to work on skill-building. Furthermore, a solid, unique internship experience can boost your resume for college!
However, internships can be hard to come by for a high school student. We’ve compiled ten solid business internships for high school students in this blog, along with important details like their application deadlines, eligibility requirements, duration, and location (if any).
However, before we dive into the opportunities, here’s why you should be aiming to do an internship while still in high school.
Why do an internship in high school?
Internships bridge the gap between your classroom curriculum and real-world experience. By participating in internships, you can gain practical knowledge and skills in different interest areas, which will help you explore potential career paths.
Internships also help you develop essential professional skills like communication, teamwork, and time management. Note that as a high school student applying to college, developing these skills early on can add an edge to your profile. Additionally, college admissions officers are looking for students who actively pursue skill-building and independent opportunities outside of their school curriculum - this demonstrates motivation and dedication toward a subject.
Additionally, internships also offer a chance for you to network with professionals in your desired fields, potentially opening doors for future job opportunities and mentorship. Overall, business internships help you enhance your academic growth, gain real-world exposure, and make informed decisions about possible future career paths during and after college.
Cost: $1490 (Financial Aid Available)
Location: Remote! You can work from anywhere in the world.
Application Deadline: April 16 and May 14
Program Length: 8 weeks, June to August
Eligibility: Students who can work for 10-20 hours/week, for 8-12 weeks. Open to high school students, undergraduate, and gap year students!
Ladder Internship is a selective program equipping students with virtual internship experiences at startups and nonprofits around the world! The startups range across a variety of industries, and each student can select which field they would most love to deep dive into.
The startups are based all across the world, with the majority being in the United States, Asia and then Europe, and the UK. The fields include technology, machine learning and AI, finance, environmental science and sustainability, business and marketing, healthcare and medicine, media and journalism, and more. You can explore all the options here on their application form.
Cost: No cost, stipend provided.
Location: California
Application Deadline: March 1st, 2023
Program Length: 6 weeks (June through July)
Eligibility: High school sophomores who are full-year residents of East Palo Alto, Belle Haven, or Redwood City are encouraged to apply
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has launched a prestigious summer opportunity for high school students, known as the Meta Summer Academy. As a participant, you will learn about various practices in Meta and learn and be a part of its day-to-day environment as an extern. It runs for 6 weeks, from June through July, and is held in California. As an extern, you will be expected to participate for 30 hours/week. Also, note that interns will be mentored by Meta summer academy mentors – these are employees in Meta. If selected, the position also offers you exposure to the tech industry. Meta provides transportation to all externs, which makes it accessible to applicants from across California. Landing an internship at Meta as a high school student is a matter of prestige, as the selection process is quite competitive, with only 150 students making it to the final cohort.
Cost: Fully funded, hourly stipend provided
Location: Washington D.C.
Application Deadline: TBA, but applications for 2024 open in October 2023.
Program Length: 8 weeks, (from the end of your school year, including the week of July 17-24)
Eligibility: A current junior or senior high school student legally authorized to work in the USA can apply.
Every year, the Bank of America Student Leaders Program admits hundreds of community-minded high schoolers into the program. Selected high-schoolers intern with nonprofits like Boys and Girls Clubs of America and Habitat for Humanity and experience community service through a paid eight-week internship.
In this highly-selective leadership program, high school students participate in the National Student Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C, and understand how stakeholders like nonprofits, governments, and businesses collaborate and interact to meet local needs. This experience enables you to create change and improve more lives with inspiring stories of enthusiasm and commitment.
Cost: No cost
Location: Richmond, Washington
Application Deadline: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, so it is recommended to apply as soon as they open in early February
Program Length: During the academic year (August through May)
Eligibility: High-school students
Working with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a business intern is a great way to gain exposure, build on your skills, and network during your school year. PNNL allows high school students to apply to internships that last through the academic year. You are expected to work 4 hours every day, 5 working days a week. PNNL coordinates with your high school to enable this as a Work-Based Learning Program. This means that your work offers elective credits at your high school. In the internship, you will be paired with mentors in PNNL’s business/administrative department. You will also participate in various leadership development activities/workshops.
Cost: No cost
Location: Remote
Application Deadline: Rolling deadlines, it is recommended that you apply as soon as possible.
Program Length: usually 3 months, June through August – but if the intern is open to it, can run year-round.
Eligibility: High-school students can apply
Building-U is a non-profit centered around helping high-school students. It operates virtually. It is currently looking for interns to assist in the administrative/business aspect of the organization. The position is for three months, and interns cover a vast range of duties. If selected, you join one of their teams – these include R&D roles, positions of student ambassadors, Business Development roles, and other profiles, more details of which you can read about here. As an intern with the business development team, you will be expected to work on cultivating partnerships, organize data around their ongoing and projected initiatives, and help them determine, develop and diversify funding streams.
Cost: No cost, hourly minimum wage provided
Location: Varies, they usually offer an internship at the closest KP office to your city
Application Deadline: TBA every year but usually around late November to early December the preceding year (for 2024, the deadline is in 2023)
Program Length: 7 weeks, full-time, in person. Usually from June to August.
Eligibility: High school students between the ages of 16 - 19
Although Kaiser Permanente looks primarily into healthcare, the KP Launch program has several responsibilities that are primarily business and administration related. The KP Launch program explicitly explores non-medical careers in healthcare and has an internship program available for high school students. These include accounting, administration, R & D, and more. As an intern, you will be paid hourly minimum wage, and apart from practical experience, the internship also has weekly workshops on professional development and is a mentored internship.
Cost: No cost
Location: Florida
Application Deadline: TBA
Program Length: 4-6 weeks
Eligibility: High school senior
Jimerson Birr is a business and commercial litigation firm that runs an HSSIP (High School Summer Internship Program) out of Jacksonville, Florida. Student Interns work closely with department heads and get to work in a wide variety of departments. Depending on their interests, you can gain experience in accounting, communications and marketing, legal services, and information technology. The firm is clear that the internship experience broadly encourages learning and gaining experience in business administration in general – as well as exposure to the workspace in a legal firm, that you can benefit from as a high school student.
Cost: No cost
Location: NYC
Application Deadline: Rolling applications
Program Length: 4 weeks
Eligibility: Rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors based in NYC are eligible to apply.
DOROT is a nonprofit that supports the elderly in averting social isolation. They offer 4 week long internships to high school students in New York City. These internships help you gain exposure in the field of non-profit management and expect you to conduct intergenerational activities with older adults. This internship is supposed to help develop leadership skills and organizational experience. Another thing that makes this a popular internship is that while doing the internship, you stand to gain over 112 hours of community service. DOROT offers these internships in 4 sessions throughout the year, two held in Manhattan, one in Long Island, and one in Brighton Beach!
Cost: None, interns are paid $18.69 hourly
Location: Seattle
Application Deadline: Rolling, applications for the Summer internship open in May, and Applications for the Winter Internship open in November.
Program Length: 8 weeks
Eligibility: Applicants must be at least 16 years old, and enrolled in high school.
The Port of Seattle offers internships to high-school students in two cohorts, during the summer and winter. This is an aspect of the internship that you may want to take into consideration while applying - you can choose to apply for any depending on your schedule during your school year (winter) and summer break. You will be expected to work across different career focuses – but there’s an emphasis on learning overall processes concerning DEI, project management, process improvement, networking, communication, and more relevant skills to gaining business and administrative experience.
Cost: No cost, annual scholarships to college offered ($10,000 per year)
Location: Varies, interns are placed in a location dependent on KPMG’s decisions on hosting the internship in a particular location.
Application Deadline: TBA, but you can expect the deadline to fall in early February 2024, based on last year's timeline.
Program Length: The summer before college.
Eligibility: High school seniors are eligible to apply.
While it is not a traditional internship, the KPMG Future Leaders Scholarship is a unique work/learn experience. It is a prestigious initiative aimed at increasing the number of women in business and STEM fields, accepting only 22 high school seniors out of hundreds of applications it receives each year. It offers you, as a KPMG scholar, mentorship with an executive mentor. These mentors are also senior business leaders who have attended the KPMG Women’s Leadership Summit, so it poses unique networking opportunities. If chosen, recipients have Leadership training and career development, annual scholarships for college, and continual support through their college education.
Additionally, there are a few more internships/mentorship/work-learn programs that did not make it to the list but are great opportunities nonetheless. You can consider applying for the following programs as well – Interns 4-Good, and the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute.
If you’re looking for an incubator program that helps you establish a developed startup in high school, consider the Young Founders Lab!
The Young Founder’s Lab is a real-world start-up bootcamp founded and run by Harvard entrepreneurs. In this program, you will work towards building a revenue-generating start-up that addresses a real-world problem. You will also have the opportunity to be mentored by established entrepreneurs and professionals from Google, Microsoft, and X.
You can access the application link here!
If you are interested in doing university-level research in business and business development, then you could also consider applying to the Lumiere Research Scholar Program, a selective online high school program for students that I founded with researchers at Harvard and Oxford. Last year, we had over 2100 students apply for 500 spots in the program! You can find the application form here.
Stephen is one of the founders of Lumiere and a Harvard College graduate. He founded Lumiere as a Ph.D. student at Harvard Business School. Lumiere is a selective research program where students work 1-1 with a research mentor to develop an independent research paper.
Image Source: KPMG Future Leaders Program logo