How Teens Actually Find Scholarships, Competitions, and Internships: What I Learned Asking My Students
Last month, Mia leaned against my desk after college and career prep, peeling a sticker off her hydroflask and asking if I knew of any summer art internships for high schoolers. I told her I’d updated the master list on Google Classroom that morning, and she laughed. “Oh, I never check that. My friend who takes pottery with me said you’d know where to look.”
That question got me thinking. I’ve been teaching 10th and 11th grade college and career for four years, and I spend a few hours every month compiling opportunities, updating the school website, sending out school-wide emails. But I’d never actually asked my students how they find these things on their own. So I put together a short, 5-question anonymous survey for all my classes, got responses from 182 students aged 14 to 17, and the results turned a lot of what I thought I knew upside down.
I passed the survey out during 4th period on a Tuesday, most kids finished it in under five minutes while they waited for the bell for lunch, half of them sneaking bites of Cheetos under their desks. It wasn’t a fancy, formal study, just my kids from our mid-sized public high school, but the patterns were hard to miss.
Seventy-two percent of respondents said they first heard about their most recent scholarship, competition, or internship from a friend or classmate. Only 11 percent found theirs through a school email, counseling office post, or the teacher-curated list I’d spent hours updating each month. Even social media, which I assumed was the main source for all things teen, only came in at 18 percent. Most of those were big national competitions kids saw on TikTok, but half the kids who found opportunities there said most posts felt like scams or were for contests you have to pay to enter, so they don’t trust most of what they see there. Scholarship search sites like Fastweb? Only 3 percent of kids had used one in the last year. Most said they tried it once as a freshman, got hundreds of results that had nothing to do with their interests, and never went back.
Javi, a junior in my third period who does robotics, told me after he filled out the survey that he got his spot at the state robotics competition last semester because his lab partner saw a flier taped to the side of the CNC machine in the shop and texted him the link. He never checks the school career page, never opens his school email except when a teacher forces him to check a grade. If his partner hadn’t texted him, he would have missed it entirely.
Last week at parent-teacher conferences, Mrs. Henderson pulled me aside to ask why I never send engineering opportunities to her son, who’s wanted to build renewable energy systems since he was 12. I told her I send a monthly email to all 11th graders with new opportunities, and she sighed. “He never checks that email. He only looks at texts. I could forward it to him, but if I send him more than one link at a time, he just ignores me.” That matched exactly what the survey said.
The whole experience pushed me to make small, low-effort changes to how I share opportunities, and they’ve already made a noticeable difference. For example, when I tell my classes about a new opportunity now, I end with one line: “If this even sounds a little interesting, text the link to one friend who you think would care. It takes 10 seconds.” I don’t force them to do it, but most kids do it without thinking. Already this semester, three times as many kids have applied for local opportunities than this time last year. It’s such a small change, it just works with how kids already share information.
For parents, I tell them this now at conferences: instead of forwarding a whole list of 15 scholarships you found on a parenting Facebook group, pick just one that lines up with what your kid actually likes, and send only that one, with a short line: “I saw this and thought of your hiking/photography/robotics, figured I’d pass it along if you have time.” No pressure to apply, no big speech about how this will get them into college. That’s exactly what Mrs. Henderson did after we talked. She sent her son one link for a local teen environmental internship that worked around his soccer schedule, and he applied last week. If she’d sent 10 links, he would have deleted the whole text.
For teachers, I started keeping a stack of printed fliers for local opportunities by the classroom door, where kids wait for me to take attendance every morning. Most kids are scrolling on their phones or chatting anyway, and they’ll glance at the fliers. If something catches their eye, they take a picture of it with their phone and text it to a friend. Two months ago, I put up fliers for a local youth poetry slam there, and 11 kids signed up. Last year, when I only posted it on Google Classroom, only 2 kids signed up.
I still keep the master list updated, and I still send the monthly emails for the small group of kids who do check those places. It’s not like we have to throw out all the old systems. But it’s been a good reminder that what works for us as adults doesn’t always work for kids. They don’t go looking for opportunities the way we do. They hear about them from people they trust, and they share them the same way. Last week, a senior stopped me in the hall asking for a scholarship for first-gen students going into education. I drew a blank, so I asked the group of kids hanging out by my door if anyone knew of anything. Three kids raised their hands, and one gave him a link to a scholarship his cousin had won the year before. That’s how it works, I think. We just have to get out of the way and let the sharing happen, and meet kids where they already are.
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