How Do Teens Find Scholarships, Competitions, and Internships? What I Learned Asking 14+ Students
The bell for dismissal had rung 20 minutes earlier, and the only sound in my office was the hum of the vending machine down the hall when 16-year-old Mia knocked, holding a crumpled flyer for a summer environmental internship. Her navy nail polish was chipped from the after-school pottery class she stays late for, and she leaned against the doorframe like she expected me to say it was a scam. “I found this on TikTok, but is it even real? None of my friends have heard of it,” she said.
As a part-time college and career counselor at our public high school, I’d been hearing questions like this more and more over the past year. For years, I’d followed the same playbook: send a weekly newsletter full of opportunities, post flyers in the cafeteria, update the school website’s career page, and wait for applications to roll in. Most of the time, I’d get 3 or 4 responses for even the best full-ride scholarships or paid internships. I knew we were missing something, so over the past two months I ran a short anonymous survey for all 14+ students in our district, and asked every kid who stopped by my office to share their own process. I wanted to know where they actually find these opportunities, not where we think they should look.
The results weren’t what I expected. Out of 127 responses, 78 said they found most opportunities through TikTok or Instagram. Another 22 said they heard about them from friends who reposted or sent them links. Only 12 said they’d ever found something from the weekly school email I send, and only 8 said they check the school’s career page. Javi, a 17-year-old senior on the boys’ soccer team, stopped by a week after the survey went out to talk about the robotics competition he’d qualified for the year before. He found it through a robot-building YouTuber he watches every Sunday after games, he told me, wiping grass off his cleats onto my entry mat. “I get 12 emails from the school a day,” he said. “If it doesn’t have a homework assignment or a reminder about a game, I delete it before I even open it.”
Fifteen-year-old Lila, a freshman who writes poetry after school, told me she found a $1,000 teen poetry scholarship through a meme account that posts teen writing. We’d posted that same scholarship three times on our website and in my newsletter. No one in her English class even knew it existed.
What I pulled from all these responses isn’t that kids are just glued to their phones and ignoring what we share. It’s that we’ve been sharing opportunities in all the wrong places, and in all the wrong formats. The biggest mistake parents and teachers make, over and over, is dumping 50 opportunities on kids at once. Over half the students who responded said when their parents forward them a giant list of scholarships from a parent Facebook group, or their teacher shares a 3-page document of summer internships, they just close it and forget about it. They can’t sort through 50 options when they’re already juggling homework, a part-time job, and practice after school.
The good news is that small, low-effort changes make a big difference. For teachers, the easiest adjustment I’ve made already is pinning one 1-sentence update to the top of every core class Google Classroom each Monday. It just says “One free opportunity this week: local art competition for students interested in illustration, link here.” It takes me 10 minutes a week to do, and already more kids are clicking through than ever opened my quarterly newsletter. You don’t have to curate a whole program; just share one relevant thing in the space kids already check every single day.
For parents, the simplest step is also the most effective: instead of forwarding every scholarship you see on your parent Facebook feed, ask your kid one question: “What accounts or creators do you follow for your hobby or whatever you’re interested in?” More often than not, those accounts are already sharing relevant opportunities that fit what your kid actually cares about. If they don’t follow any accounts that post opportunities, you can look up 1 or 2 small creators that focus on their interest and share the account with them. Don’t send them 20 links; just share the account and let them check it when they have time. For example, if your kid loves environmental work, the TikTok account @teenclimateopportunities posts one new internship or scholarship a week, no endless scrolling required.
The scam question Mia brought up is the other big thing most of us get wrong. We don’t need to warn kids off everything they find on social media. Just teach them one simple check: does it ask for a credit card number or your full social security number before you even get to the application questions? If yes, it’s a scam. If not, it’s almost always legitimate, and if you’re still unsure, just shoot your kid’s college counselor a quick email—we can check it in two minutes.
I’ve been running a small Instagram account for my office for a month now, posting one opportunity a week, and 82 students follow it already. Three of them have submitted applications to things they never would have seen otherwise. But it’s not a fix for everything. The survey also showed that kids whose parents work professional jobs are still three times more likely to hear about unposted internships through family friends than kids whose parents work hourly or service jobs. We still haven’t figured out how to consistently reach kids who don’t use social media much, or who don’t have anyone pointing them toward opportunities that fit their interests. Last week, another sophomore stopped by my office with an opportunity he found on Instagram, asking if it was real. I told him yes, helped him fix a typo on his resume draft, and he left. I still don’t have all the answers, but at least now I know I don’t have to send 10-page newsletters that no one reads. Small, one-at-a-time updates, in the spaces kids already look, that’s a start.
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