High school juniors from South Colorado will share their summer internship experience on Tuesday at the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride.
The event is open to the public. It will start with a reception at 5 p.m., and presentations begin at 6 p.m.
For most of the students, these six weeks of full-time work in a new place was their first time away from home, and their first hands-on work experience.
“It was eye-opening,” said Samantha Abate, a junior at Dolores High School who landed a marine biology internship in Santa Barbara, California, this summer.
Kaylynn Quinonez from Montezuma-Cortez High School said flying to Georgia for her marine biology internship was her first time on an airplane. She summarized the experience in a blog post, which all the interns wrote in their time away: “The airplane was definitely less comfy than I had imagined,” she wrote.
The Telluride-based Pinhead Institute puts on the program. It was founded in 2001 by a local mother who wanted better science education for kids.
Nowadays, they have a handful of opportunities for students interested in science, technology, engineering and math. One of these opportunities is their internship program.
What they craftily call the Pinternship Program is for students the summer before their senior year to get experience in a STEM field they’re interested in before they go to college.
“There are smart kids everywhere, but if you take them out of a small town and send them somewhere like Harvard or Yale, it might be kind of jarring if they’ve never been anywhere,” said Sarah Holbrooke, the executive director of Pinhead Institute. “We do this in part so that kids can get exposed to different cultures and also high-level academic research in advance, before they apply to college.”
Siena Parr, another student at Dolores High School, said before her internship in La Jolla, California, this summer, she had never been away from home for more than two weeks.
“The program lets younger students live on their own, manage their own money,” said Parr. “It’s great for independence and for confidence.”
Quinonez echoed the point: “I didn’t realize how much a coffee could really cost.”
Parr said she worked in a lab studying neuroscience and got a lot of hands-on experience, more than she expected.
“They didn’t treat me like a 17-year-old at all. There were some points where I was like, ‘Are you sure you want me to do this’,” Parr said with a laugh.
Pinhead Institute accepts roughly 25 students every year from Telluride, Dolores, Cortez, Ouray, Ridgeway, Montrose, Olathe, Norwood, Nucla, Naturita and Paradox.
Holbrooke said they put it on at no cost to families that make $100,000 a year or less. Families who bring in between $100,000 to $300,000 are expected to pay for airfare and housing, and those making $300,000 a year or more are expected to pay the full cost of the program, about $8,000.
“This is a great opportunity for kids whose parents haven’t thought that this could possibly be a possibility,” Holbrooke said.
And it’s a great opportunity for kids to break out of their comfort zone, Quinonez said.
“There’s a lot of times where people would turn things down cause they’re a little scared, but it’s a good time to, you know, get to know yourself and get to know the opportunities you have in the future,” Quinonez said.
The Pinhead Institute is a nonprofit. It usually brings in enough money the night of the intern presentations to fund the program for the next year.
“We have math-oriented interns up on stage at a whiteboard writing down how much, you know, as people are donating $20, $50, $100, $10,000, keeping track of the donations as they come in fast and furious in the room,” Holbrooke said.
“We usually get close to funding that whole program in that room.”
Parr and Abate agreed they’d recommend the program to anyone interested – and have been. In addition to the work experience, they hadn’t ever felt that kind of freedom.
Anyone can come to the free event at the opera house. Students and families interested in the program should stay for the duration of the event, Holbrooke said.
The next step would be to apply. The application goes live on the Pinhead Institute’s website on Nov. 22, the Friday before Thanksgiving.
Applicants will be interviewed in December and will know whether they got into the program by New Year’s Day.
“Whatever you’re expecting, it’ll be a little different from that,” Parr said.
For instance, Quinonez was interested in forensic psychology, yet her program was in marine biology. She said it was still a worthwhile time of growth and learning.
“I was honestly a little scared of the ocean because I wasn’t around it a lot,” said Quinonez. “A big thing I learned is that wildlife doesn’t have to be as scary as it seems. Everyone’s scared of jellyfish and sharks and everything that lives in the ocean but … once you learn more about them … they’re not as scary as they seem.”
Though Quinonez plans to pursue forensic psychology, Holbrooke, the executive director of Pinhead Institute, emphasized that even if a student comes back with a total change of plans as far as college majors go, it’s just as rewarding as reinforcing an interest.
“We feel like we’re a success if a kid goes off for the summer and comes back loving the thing they studied, and we also feel like we’re a success if they go away and come back and say, ‘I don’t want to do that anymore,’” Holbrooke said.
