Why the first internship matters most
The compounding effect of early real-world experience on lifetime earnings and confidence.
The first internship isn't the best internship a student will ever have. It's usually the worst one. That's the point.
A 17-year-old sitting in a real standup for the first time learns something no class can teach: what it feels like to be the least experienced person in a room where the work is actually shipping. They notice how the senior person cuts a meeting short. How the PM writes a two-sentence Slack message instead of a paragraph. How nobody flinches when a demo breaks.
That noticing is the compounding asset. Every future job draws down on it.
The gap between school and work
In school, the assignment is legible. There's a rubric, a due date, and a person whose job is to grade you fairly. At work, none of that exists. The assignment shifts on Wednesday. The rubric is your manager's mood on Friday. And nobody's job is to notice you're doing well.
A student who runs into that gap for the first time at 22, on their first salaried job, spends the first year absorbing shock. A student who runs into it at 16 spends that year building a nervous system for it.
What early exposure actually buys
The research on internships and lifetime earnings is well-covered. What gets undercovered is the confidence dividend. Students who have shipped anything real, once, walk into interviews differently. They ask better questions. They don't need the recruiter to like them.
You can see it in the second cohort of anything. The kids from cohort one are calmer. Not smarter. Calmer.
What we tell parents
The instinct is to wait until college. Wait until the resume is polished. Wait until the student is sure. Waiting is expensive. Not in dollars. In reps.
Put them in a room where the work is real, even if the stakes are small. Let the first internship be the messy one. The good ones after that will feel easier than they should.