By Yasmeen Alam and Nina Gersen, Contributing Writer and Executive Editor |

It’s the middle of the spring semester of your junior year, and you, along with all other students, are scrambling to find an internship or a summer opportunity that both interests you and is willing to hire you as a high school student; a nearly impossible task. If you’re interested in science, you’re in luck. Winsor has a science internship program with job opportunities in various STEM fields exclusively for Winsor students, and even a grant fund to help those students who would otherwise have to work over the summer. For those of us who are humanities kids, however, there’s no such program. 

As two students interested in the humanities, we’ve watched many of our peers receive support and opportunities from Winsor to pursue academic interests and topics outside of school. Both the Independent Research course and Summer Internship facilitate co-curricular work for students interested in STEM. The current institutional support for students interested in STEM fields is valuable, but it is unbalanced. For those students passionate about history, English, language, or essentially any other non-STEM field, the opportunities are lacking. 

The inequity in this support does not actually reflect the interests of Winsor’s student body. While there are many students interested in pursuing STEM in college or careers, in a survey conducted for this article among this year’s junior class, 57% of respondents said that they envisioned themselves pursuing the humanities in college. Additionally, in this survey, many students expressed their wish that Winsor had more opportunities in the humanities. 

Winsor’s main internship resource, the Science Internship Program, originated in the early 2000s as an effort by the science department to help support students interested in pursuing external opportunities in STEM fields. Science Faculty Ms. Labieniec, who is managing the Science Internship Program this year, said that before this program’s creation, “Students sometimes found these opportunities, if they had families who were in science, or if they had a family friend, and so they could find opportunities, if they had connections to the scientific field. For a number of years, we had students doing projects, but there was no set program. Many of the science faculty were wondering: ‘How can we really formalize this program more in order to have something where Winsor supports students?’”

Eventually, the science faculty developed the Science Internship Program, which places roughly 20-30 Winsor students a year at labs or data-centered research projects in the Boston area. Last summer, Aoife Keane ’27 participated in the Science Internship Program, and thanks to the experience she gained and the connections she made, this summer she will continue working in the same lab. “I was able to get an internship that aligned perfectly with one of my specific interests. Doing this internship allowed me to gain experience analyzing data and working on a paper in a lab, and I am looking forward to returning this summer.”

An internship is an opportunity to gain real-world work experience in a field that interests you, and, especially as juniors face college applications in the fall, this experience can help clarify our interests and passions. Finding an internship in the humanities on your own is difficult, but it is not impossible. There is plenty of interesting humanities-centered work and research happening in Boston, but this work is inaccessible to most high school students. The benefit of the Science Internship Program, however, is not simply the opportunities it provides, but the structure and support it gives to these opportunities. 

Right now, Winsor is in a similar stage as it was before the creation of the science internship; there are many students finding these humanities opportunities through connections and family friends, but there is no formal program. However, many students don’t have access to these connections, creating a massive inequality in opportunities due to a lack of institutional support. Taking these already existing opportunities and turning them into a structured internship program, as was once done with the Science Internship Program, would allow students to have more equal access to opportunities and provide support for all those students currently struggling to find an internship this summer.