Internships for Talented High School Students?

xeon4life asks: "I'm an Austin, Texas area high school senior with a slight dilemma: I need a job, I don't want what's offered at my age, and internships are not quite open for kids like me. I've recently been reading essays by Paul Graham about creating your own startup and have been motivated enough to convince two of my good friends to go into business with me later, during college. Thus, an internship at this point would be the ideal solution for me now, but nobody is willing to take me as an intern because I'm still in high school. What am I to do?" "People have suggested that I just do what every other good American high school citizen does and take a mediocre job. The problem is, I feel it would be a waste of my talents right now to be stuck folding shirts at the local mall or flipping cheeseburgers when I could be helping develop a cutting-edge game, the next-generation compiler, or even the Linux kernel as an intern. I have a higher than most college students' understanding of concepts, and some real programming experience in languages like assembly and C/C++, but that isn't going to amount to anything if I can never find an interviewer who will at least listen to me. I'd appreciate any input the Slashdot readership can give me."

Comments

Wrong explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an Austin, Texas area high school senior with a slight dilemma ... but nobody is willing to take me as an intern because I'm still in high school.

No one is willing to take you as an intern because you are from Texas, not because you are still in high school. A "talented high school student" in the Texas public school system roughly corresponds to a "special-ed high school student" in most other states in the union. Companies don't want to hire some teenage kid who's going to harrass his cubicle-mates and water-cooler-associates with how God created the Universe in seven days and that evolution is the tool of the Devil. No one is going to pay an intern $10/hour to bore his co-workers with his explanation for why jaywalkers should get the electric chair and it's everyone's civic duty to carry a firearm. And certainly no one wants to hear an intern with a Texas draw paging someone over the loudspeaker at work.