Ask HN: How to get a high school internship?

Maybe identify what you miss other than the semesters requirement and grind towards adding them. The semester thing may simply mean they want someone who has made it through the first two years of college. It may be a thing to avoid students likely to drop out of college or something like that. Your robotics experience may go some ways ameliorating that worry.

Otherwise, I’d say spend some time figuring out what’s coming in your college courses. If you have areas of weakness now is the time to go back and strengthen that knowledge without homework and quiz stressors.

Edit-also, lookup the syllabus for your coming courses. If you can ID which textbooks you’ll need and get them you can start reading them now. These are usually posted on professor pages or department pages.

when you see an interesting job, try to find the recruiter (or sometimes better, but harder to find, the actual hiring manager) and send them a brief message explaining why you're interested in the job and why you think you would do well. if nothing else, this will help you identify stuff to learn over the next few months.

Give yourself a project. Make it something very simple that people can see. A web app to do X. A mobile app to do Y. A chat bot to do Z. Whatever. Going through the entire process to get something live that people can use is a great experience.

I was very respectful and humble in my request. Told him what I could offer and expressed that I wasn't in it "for a summer job". I really wanted to learn and just needed someone to give me a chance. In exchange I would write whatever code they needed.

This was in Lancaster, PA, a county of 500,000 centered around a city of 60k. So that is to say it was a very small metro area.

So in general, look local and respond to job ads hiring full time programmers. Local companies are always desperate for smart and ambitious folks, regardless of their level of education. If you're in a metro area of a city with at least 50k you'll likely be able to eventually find a company willing to bring you as an intern.

Good luck and don't get discouraged if people say no! Internships and full time jobs in tech are a numbers game.

Also ask some students there about the hardest subject in the first semester, as it may be the hardest semester for getting rid of students (for us it was calculus, but it was easy for me, as I amazing math classes in high school and went to math competitions before).

I wouldn’t do example projects, as it’s much harder to make an impact there than by getting good grades or working for a known company.

We get email from students/schools now and then, and we have them when not too busy

Do you have an email or twitter?

My first internship was after middle school. It was unpaid and it was at a research lab that my fathers friend worked at. It was in MechE work. Did that for a summer.

Then, i told someone who ran the lab i wanted to go into medical sciences, and he called up some one at a sister lab who did physiology research. I did that paid for a summer. The next summer i went back, and helped them with data science work where i realized i wanted to do CS stuff. They hired me for a third summer to work on data acquisition applications and related stuff. I continued that until college.

During my free time, i was writing my own smart home hub, and i had it on my resume. Showed that to a company at career fair, they hired me on the spot (or almost).

TLDR: You really need a network to get it without any skill or validation. Projects can help you show initiative and basic skill.