Internships. In snoburbia, if you don’t have an internship in high school or college you are nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing. You might as well go to your state university or (shudder) community college.
You can ask your dad to call his friend the Congressman so you can work on Capitol Hill. You were the literary magazine editor in your magnet? Maybe you have the chops and connections to work at a magazine downtown. How glamorous [unpaid]!
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But it's the NIH science internships that will make your college application rise to the top of the pile at Stanford. Or how about interning at one of the biotech companies outside the Beltway? The Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. have some of the most impressive genetic science companies in the world, including Celera (which successfully sequenced an entire organism’s genome, that of a bacterium) and Human Genome Sciences, among others.
These impressive scientists from all over the world have equally impressive children, who do school science fair projects with titles like, “The Effect of Green Tea Polyphenols on Levels of Nucleotide Excision Repair Gene Expression in and the Survival Rate of Dictyostelium Discoidium.” This is an actual project title from the Montgomery County Science Fair. I could not make this up. One of the science fair judges said that some of these children should be given a graduate degree for their projects.
All this science internship competition is ratified by acceptance as a semi-finalist or finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search. Simply known as Intel, it is the Holy Grail, the Oscars for gifted science students in high schools around the country – but especially in snoburbia.
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HAH!
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/20/104-unpaid-internships/
Posted by: LL | July 21, 2008 at 07:08 PM