Getting an Internship as a Middle Schooler
Follow your passion, and suddenly your dreams come true.
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I had been interested in programming ever since I was 7. I had a passion to make those blinking lights on the computer screen do stuff. Didn’t matter what, just stuff. And even better, if you did something on that computer screen, something else would react to that thing and do some other stuff. I was a 7-year-old fascinated by blinking lights — what else would you expect?
Sometime in 2014
In 2014, I finally got to using my Facebook account I created, and I started exploring groups that my Facebook friends have recommended to me. Lucky for me, Facebook’s wonderful privacy-invading group recommendation algorithm suggested to me a couple of Facebook groups that would essentially change my life.
May 2014
On May 23, 2014, I was in 7th grade, browsing the Facebook group HS Hackers (which was basically lots of my free time back then). I had very beginner programming experience — I’d made my own website in PHP, a couple of Minecraft Bukkit plugins, and some other stuff — I was really interested in programming as a whole. I used the resources I had around to try to extend my programming knowledge to the max. I even used my dad’s PC as a web server for a time; that did not turn out well in the end.
However, one discussion brought in the Facebook group piqued my interest; it was about hackathons.
“Hackathons? Is that a thing where you like, hack into stuff for a day?”
Well, I was interested by that point. Someone in that discussion thought they might have heard of a hackathon for high schoolers called “code day”? So I went on Google at around 10:30 at night, wondering what this “code day” was.
When I looked it up, I was so excited because they had an event in San Diego, and it was the next day! So I asked my dad if I could go, and he said yes.
So I went to CodeDay, learned lots of stuff from others around me along the way, and definitely messed around a lot. In the end, though, it was definitely a lot of fun.
November 2014
A couple months after the event, I received a Facebook message from the regional manager of CodeDay San Diego:
I was eager to be a part of CodeDay, so of course I accepted.
I noticed that last CodeDay, team management and presentations were hectic: the organizers were going around asking team names down and writing them down on paper, making an order at the last second directly before presentations. And even after presentations were over, the organizers had to scramble to write down the team names, descriptions of what they did, all while cleaning up the venue. I had recently learned the basics of Ruby on Rails, so I immediately thought of an app that could remedy this — so, the first version of CodeDay Teams (now known as Showcase) is born, right on time for CodeDay Fall 2014! At this point, I had met Tyler Menezes, the executive director of StudentRND — the nonprofit behind CodeDay — and he let me use codeday.org for the website instead of my own, so it looks more professional.
February 2015
This was a very simple Rails app, and had basic capability for only one region at a time (this region being San Diego, obviously). Later on in February 2015, admins and organizers also gained the ability to add awards to teams, one of the main features of the site today.
A couple days after I implemented this, Tyler reached out to me asking if I was interested in an internship there since I built CodeDay Teams.
Without being asked, TJ was already doing most of the technical work our business needed done. So I hired him so I could ask him to do specific things. Also, he seemed pretty professional so I had no idea he was in middle school.
— Tyler, Executive Director at StudentRND
My interest in programming definitely paid off and got me an awesome internship at a cool non-profit. And, what’s best is that I get the opportunity to show students how awesome STEM education and computer science can be, and how diverse the fields are in the real world.
Now
Looking back, I now realize how special of an opportunity that simply pursuing my interest gave me — I got a high-school level internship as an 8th grader! (The assistant principal was definitely impressed…) And I still intern for StudentRND, making awesome tools to help us out internally like Clear, our Slack bots, and Showcase for team presentations. I’ve learned so much more about managing servers, expanding my horizons when it comes to new languages, frameworks, or just programming in general. It’s been a really awesome ride, and I will definitely write about my experience at StudentRND later on.
Thank you for reading. And remember, if you pursue your interests, someone will always take notice, whether that be an employer, teacher, or hell, even your parents. This doesn’t only apply to programming or computer science. If you have an interest in music, buy some books on Amazon, ask around your community, Google some stuff!
