Mentors & Hosts
Be a mentor or a host!
Our flagship program is the Pinhead Internship, where we choose high-achieving high-schoolers and send them off to internships in various fields according to the students’ interests. Our former interns have found their experiences to be life-changing and inspirational. Previous interns have graduated from Harvard and Yale, and last summer’s interns have been accepted at Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth and Columbia.
For Mentors
The students intern at universities, labs, and industry across the country for a time period between four to eight weeks. The average is six weeks but our timing is flexible. Once we find a mentor for each student, we then secure a host family and provide a stipend for travel and living expenses. So to be clear, once the internship has been secured, Pinhead takes care of all other details. The students are required to write a weekly blog for our website, and also to present the details of their internship in front of the community at a special night-time event the fall after they return, so the community and Pinhead’s supporters get to hear about the amazing experiences our interns have had.
For Hosts
We are always on the lookout for HOST HOUSING for our interns – especially in areas like Boulder or Golden Colorado, and Santa Barbara and San Diego California. Here’s what we hope for with a host family: We’d like our student to have his or her own room but shared bathrooms are fine. We hope the student would be welcome in the kitchen to make breakfast and pack a lunch. If your family is eating dinner together, welcome our student to the dinner table. Otherwise the student should be allowed to cook their own dinner as well. Interns are required to keep their rooms and the kitchen clean, do their own laundry, and buy their own groceries unless the host family can provide that. We have a host stipend of up to $400 per week depending on the area which should cover food if the student isn’t buying their own. We expect kindness, gratitude, and responsibility from all our students and they usually blend in with their host families well. Students are responsible for their own transportation to and from their internships and are expected to abide by host family house rules.