Why Most Teens Struggle to Find Scholarships, Internships and Competitions (What I Learned From a Student Survey)
Last Tuesday, I was stacking cereal bowls after dinner when my 11th grader Javi dropped his phone on the counter and groaned. He’d been looking for a beginner coding competition for high schoolers for three weeks, he said, and everything he found was either for college students, closed for entries, or required a $75 entrance fee we both knew he didn’t want to pay out of his lawn mowing money. The next morning, I brought a stack of survey flyers to the study halls I cover for our district’s college and career initiative, and it clicked: the topic of the survey was exactly what Javi was complaining about—how students 14 and up actually find opportunities like scholarships, competitions, and internships.
We’d put the survey together to figure out why we had so few applicants for most of our local opportunities every year. Over two weeks, 127 students from three different area high schools filled it out, and I spent that Friday night going through the responses at my kitchen table, post-dinner, same as I’d listened to Javi complain. A lot of what I read matched what he’d told me. More than half of respondents said they find most of their opportunity leads on TikTok or Instagram. But 70% of those same students said 8 out of 10 posts they see are for opportunities that already closed, or they don’t qualify because they live out of state, or the fine print says it’s only for juniors in college. Only 18% said they regularly check their school’s career or scholarship page on the district website. When I asked why, the most common answer was that it takes too many clicks to get there, and it’s only updated once a semester, so half the deadlines are already past when it gets posted.
One 10th grader named Mia, who wants to be a physical therapist, wrote that no one she knows has connections to PT clinics. Her mom works two nursing shifts and doesn’t have time to cold email offices asking for internships, and none of her friends are looking for opportunities yet, so she hasn’t found anything. That stood out next to the response from a 12th grader who said he got his internship at a downtown law firm just from his dad’s golf buddy. He never had to search for it at all. A lot of the kids who said they’d found successful opportunities didn’t find them through any official channel—they got them through a parent’s friend, a coach, or a random meme on Reddit. One kid wrote he got a $500 scholarship for native plant gardening from a meme that popped up on his feed. The caption just said “free money for people who like gardening,” so he applied on a whim and got it.
Before I read these responses, I’d thought the problem was that kids just don’t look hard enough. I’d heard other teachers and parents say it all the time. That’s not what I saw here. Most of the kids who wanted opportunities were looking. They were just looking in the places they actually spend time, and most official opportunity postings aren’t there. The big national scholarships that get announced in every assembly have thousands of applicants, but the local rotary club scholarship that gives $1000 and only gets a dozen applicants? No one’s posting that on TikTok, so most kids never hear about it.
I’ve already made a few small changes in my office that have worked better than I expected. I cleared off a small section of the whiteboard by my door, and I only write current, local opportunities there, with the deadline in big red marker. No fine print, just a one-sentence description and a note about where to get the application. In the month I’ve had it up, 19 kids have stopped to take a picture of it, and seven have already applied. That’s more than the number of kids who clicked the scholarship page on our website all last semester.
For parents, I tell them they don’t need to spend hours every week curating a list of opportunities. Just follow two or three local groups related to whatever your kid cares about—if they like soccer, follow the state high school soccer association; if they like writing, follow the local writers’ guild. When those groups post a teen competition or scholarship, just forward it to your kid’s text thread. You don’t have to pressure them to apply, just let them know it’s there. If your kid wants an internship and you don’t have professional connections in their field of interest, ask their soccer coach, art teacher, or youth group leader if they know anyone who works in that field. Most people are happy to let a teen shadow for a week or help them get a part-time internship, even if it’s not posted anywhere. Last month one of my students got an internship at a local vet clinic just because her dance teacher knew the owner.
Last week Javi saw that same local coding competition on my whiteboard. It had a $10 entrance fee, and the top prize is $300 for the team. He signed up with a friend from his AP Comp Sci class, and they’re meeting this weekend to work on their project. We still don’t have all the final results from the survey, and we’re still trying to figure out how to get more local opportunities in front of kids who don’t have existing connections. It’s not a big, complicated fix, though. Mostly, it just means putting the information where kids already are, instead of expecting them to dig through an outdated district website to find it. Some days, a whiteboard by the door and a forwarded text is enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Most Teens Struggle to Find Scholarships, Internships and Competitions (What I Learned From a Student Survey)