How to Get a High School Internship:
The Email That Works

In the United States, Bank of America Student Leaders places juniors and seniors in paid summer roles and closes in mid-January. The NIH high school programme pays a stipend of $2,300 to $2,530 and closes in early February. NASA's OSTEM internships pay stipends, with the summer 2027 round closing on 26 February 2027.

Elsewhere the same shape holds with different names. In the UK, Nuffield Research Placements are fully funded placements of four to six weeks, and In2STEM runs free for 16 and 17 year olds with travel and lunch covered. In India, RSI India runs cost-free at IISc Bengaluru, and the INSPIRE internship camp is free but nomination-based for students in the top one percent of their Class 10 boards. In Singapore, the A*STAR Science Awards attach secondary and junior college students to research institutes.

One correction worth having, because Indian students are pointed at these constantly: NIUS, and the IISc and IISER summer internships, are undergraduate programmes. If you are in Class 11 or 12 you are not eligible, however strong your marks are, and no amount of applying will change that.

A dental practice, a small law office, a university lab, a local newspaper, an architecture studio, a food bank, a neighbourhood clinic, an auto workshop, a bakery, a small accounting firm. None of these run an internship programme. None will ever post a listing. Most would say yes to a specific, polite, organised student who asked to come in for a few weeks and help with something real.

This is not a workaround. It is how the majority of these placements have always happened, and in some markets it is close to the only route. In India the formal infrastructure for school-age research placements barely exists, which makes local small and micro enterprises near your school the realistic path rather than the consolation prize.

Singapore's A*STAR, which does run formal programmes, tells students plainly that they can write directly to a research institute with their CV, their results and the period they want. A national research agency is telling you the direct ask is a legitimate door. It is the same door everywhere, just usually unmarked.

Every line here is doing a job. It states your age and year immediately so nobody is surprised later. It proves you looked them up. It asks for something small and specific instead of a vague opportunity. And it removes, before they can raise them, the three reasons an adult hesitates over a student.

Send it to a named human, never to an info address or a contact form. At a small business that is usually the owner. At a lab it is the professor or the lab manager. At a clinic it is the practice manager. Their name is almost always on the website or in something they have published.

Earlier this report warned you about programmes that charge families thousands. Now it suggests offering to work unpaid. These are not the same thing: in one you pay someone for access, in the other nobody pays anybody.

The legal detail decides who can say yes without checking with anyone. In the United States, hours stop being federally capped at 16 but hazardous occupations stay closed until 18, most states require a work permit under 18, and unpaid work at a for-profit has to be genuinely educational rather than replacing a paid employee. In India, the Child and Adolescent Labour Act permits 14 to 18 year olds to work in non-hazardous occupations, with hazardous ones prohibited outright and real penalties attached. In the UK, under-16s typically need a local authority work permit and face term-time hour limits.

Across all of them the same organisations say yes fastest: nonprofits, charities, public institutions, schools, hospitals in a shadowing capacity, and university labs. They can accept a student without the employment questions a private company has to think about. Hazardous work is closed to you almost everywhere until you are 18, so do not ask a construction site or a machine shop for floor time in any country.

A single follow-up lifts reply rates by about 66 percent. Almost no student sends one, because silence feels like rejection and following up feels like pestering. It is neither. Busy people open an email, intend to reply, and forget within the hour.

Wait a week, then reply to your own original email so the thread stays together. Three sentences: you are following up, the specific ask again, and no problem at all if it is not possible. Then stop. One follow-up, not four.

A no is worth answering too. Reply once, briefly, and make a smaller ask: could you spare twenty minutes to tell me how you got into this. A surprising number of those conversations end with the person offering something anyway, or naming someone who will. That is how one email becomes three.