As Mehar's school counselor I am beyond impressed by the hard work and dedication he has put into the site. The site is the perfect toolbox that counselors and students have been looking for. The site is user friendly and has a diverse range of options for students to search through. The potential of this site is endless and a great opportunity for future students!

Thanks so much for reaching out! First, let me commend you for identifying a problem and putting in the sweat equity to create a solution. I really like what you have done and I see you have iterated a number of features over the last few months based on your blog posts. That is awesome, great work! How are you combing for opportunities to create your database? Are you doing this manually or are you running some type of scraping macro? I see you have done Mobile Apps and programming via Computer Science. Just out of curiosity - do you have any game development experience? If so, I have an interesting idea that you might be able to help me flush out. I will continue to watch the progress of your tool to see if it might be something we can present to our students next year. We are here in Colorado and I know your database will continue to grow in time. Keep up the great work!

Let me just say that I am beyond impressed! This is such an excellent resource that you have created! The lack of resources to help students find appropriate summer opportunities for their interests is something that the counselors at my school have been talking about for quite some time. You should be very proud of what you have accomplished! After navigating through your website briefly, the only suggestions I have at this time are as follows 1) Continue to build your database - it is clear that you have worked hard to include as many opportunities as you could find to create this search tool. That is no small feat. As you continue to build and improve your program, keep working to capture as many opportunities as you can to add. (I like that you are planning to add a feature to allow counselors to add additional opportunities) While it is impossible to capture every opportunity, the more you are able to add the stronger and more helpful this tool will be. 2) The only aspect of the search tool that was strange to navigate was the ordering of the numbers for the "Duration" drop-down menu. They were listed in a strange order based on the first number of the digit. If these could be listed in typical numerical order, that would be an improvement (but this is just a minor flaw). You can be sure that I will be sharing this tool with my students to help them find potential summer programs. I will keep an eye out for updates as you continue to make changes and improvements to this tool. I have shared your message and website with the other counselors on my team as well. This is a truly excellent and innovative product. I am sure that you have a very bright future ahead of you! Best regards

Thank you for sharing and good luck with this project. I'll be sure to share it with the rest of the staff and forward you any feedback related to your search engine.

Your email caught my eye -- I am also from New Jersey originally, so I had to check out your website! Thank you for including me on your email list. I am happy to provide feedback. I love the clean layout you have used for your formatting; I know exactly how to navigate around your site, and I am not always the most tech-savvy so I think it's accessible for a lot of people. Is it translatable to other languages when it detects English? I would like to encourage you to consider options for removing programs that have had a deadline pass. Students might get confused and try and apply for something that has already closed. I also suggest adding years to your dates to minimize confusion; it might seem self-explanatory, but it might help to streamline a student's search. Is there a "favorite" list of students where students can save their searches? This might be a way to keep them coming back to the website and increase traffic... Or a way for students to keep track of what they have already applied for? I am assuming that students apply through the website provided, but would you want to integrate the applications onto the website so it is all in one place? I LOVE the idea of bringing programs and opportunities into one space for ease of access. I think this is a wonderful idea and it is executed almost perfectly. I am sure that you are still tweaking and perfecting as you go -- this is a GREAT project and I want to encourage you to keep it up!! As a high school counselor, I am always amazed by my students and what they come up with. Be sure to send this out to your local schools, you might even want to send this out to local news teams-- people love to hear about cool things that bright people are doing, so I want you to market yourself and your "product" as much as you are comfortable!! Best of luck on your journey -- and continue to represent NJ well! Take good care. Best wishes,

I have some recommendations. First include programs related to specific sports such as Volleyball, basketball, soccer, etc. as there are many student-athletes that search for this. Second, allow a more general search option by including an "All" option in categories such as state or region and even on category as not everyone is sure what they are searching for and want to have multiple areas at once rather than specific and this will allow them to avoid multiple searches.

Thank you for the links and for all the work you put into this site! Wow! I have been working with trying to organize summer programs for my job running a career and college center at a rural public school in California. I have a small spreadsheet of programs, but a deep knowledge of how programs fit into different "types" based on the goals of the programs. I work with several populations of underserved students, and there are many programs targeting at these students. I also work with students as a private college admissions consultant. My son will graduate from Stanford this year in Computer Science, and I first learned about summer programs when he was a sophomore in high school - we lucked into a list from MIT and he attended SSP. I would love to talk to you about your project. Perhaps we could meet on Zoom when you have time (I know high school juniors are very busy). I would also like to talk to you about the cost of creating a site my school could use where I could post local opportunities as well as all the rest. Very few of my students would consider paying for a costly summer program, and, as rural students, they are a little behind on the motivation to participate in academics over the summer. However, I persist in trying to present opportunities! Thanks again for all your hard work. It's very impressive!

Thank you so much for reaching out and creating and sending this amazing resource out to me. As a School Counselor, it is so helpful for me to be able to direct students and families to this site so that they can find opportunities. I love it! I really like that you can search for free programs-that makes it accessible to all students. This is very impressive and so useful to students. Once this becomes well known I think that colleges/universities/programs will be looking to add their opportunities to this website. Thank you and I plan to share it with my students. I hope you and your family are well in these unprecedented times.

Thank you for reaching out and sending me such valuable information. I will absolutely share your website with parents and students, as they are constantly looking for summer opportunities available to them. I will communicate with my team to see if having a seminar this school year would be possible.

Thank you so much for reaching out. This is a wonderful tool that you have created for students. I am extremely impressed by your motivation and entrepreneurial mindset!! So far what I have seen seems to be very helpful and easy for students to research. Are you asking counselors for other programs to add? I know there are more out there and am curious as to how you will continue to add them. Do you have help? We have two google documents that we share with our students that are ever-changing. One is for scholarships and the other lists summer programs. It can be very overwhelming for students to review. If we decided to watch your webinar or offer it to our students, is it a recorded webinar? Is there a cost to it? Keep up the good work. I am grateful and impressed by the work you have done!! Have a great week!

Mehar, this looks like an easy to navigate site, just as you intended. 🙂 I will post and share with students. You may want to add information about public service opportunities and serving in government. As you have discovered, there is a wealth of information out there, but not all of it is worthy of students and counselors time. Feel free to bounce ideas with me. Cheryl Haller https://www.usajobs.gov/Help/working-in-government/unique-hiring-paths/students/

First of all, congratulations on taking this initiative, I am very impressed and I think you are in the right direction. Your website is very impressive and I think it is precisely what many students and counselors need. Also, thank you for sending this to me. I know that the most important thing for you is to improve your website and help more students so thankful for being open to feedback. On your website: I loved it! I think the search tools are great. I have tried myself to compile some of these programs this year but as you said, spreadsheets are not ideal for this. I will share some of the information we started collecting in case you haven't added them to your database. Also, I am not sure if you know about the College & Career Team in the Dept. of Education. They would LOVE to see this and possibly help you expand it. Let me know if you want more info. I hope you find this feedback useful. Have a nice day,

THIS IS AWESOME! Thanks for sharing!!

I hope this email may find you well. I want to thank you for sharing this extremely helpful resource as it is definitely necessary to have something like this so thousands of students especially students who are first-generation won't miss opportunities like summer programs. I find the search bar very easy and appreciate the categories and tools you have provided. Two recommendations I would encourage you to add is an option to filter and organize programs from earlier application deadlines to later application deadlines. Another recommendation I would also like to see is a map to be able to provide students an idea of where their program will be a location in order to plan out logistics with students. Thank you and please let me know if you have any questions or need any clarifications on the recommendations. All the best,

Thank you. I will have my intern check out this information to see if we can use this on our site.

Thank you for sharing--your website is very impressive! I think it can be a useful tool for students trying to identify summer experiences that align with their interests, and your database seems comprehensive. For feedback, I suggesting removing language like "best" (very subjective--"best" for one might not be a great fit for another) and "that is all there is" at the end of search results (there could be many more programs out there that are new or that did not make it into your database). Can you tell me a little more about this project? Where did you find the time and resources to compile so much data and organize it into a functional website? Also, I'm curious to know where you found my contact info and presumably the email addresses of a wide-reaching audience of counselors. I don't mean to press--just curious to learn. Thanks again for sharing this wonderful project, and keep up the great work!

This is quite an amazing site! Incredibly sophisticated...I'm in awe that a high school student developed this and I've shared it with some colleagues. Are you fee-based? Can students just access this? It's a pretty comprehensive tool...I just want to be sure there are no 'hidden costs' regarding access. Many thanks...

Thank you for sharing the website!

Thanks so much for reaching out. Your website is amazing! I am constantly trying to compile a list of summer programs so this is very helpful. We will send your website out to our students for them to peruse. I also copied all of our counselors on this email. I also included our career counselors who can use this to reference internships. Thanks again! PS. I can't believe you're doing all this while you're still in high school. Big things ahead for you!

Thank you very much for passing this information along! What a wonderful resource. I will share with my department and students/families at Framingham High School.

This is awesome, Mehar. Thank you so much!!

This is super helpful. As a counselor in the Boston area, it would be helpful if you put the location of all internships as a key part of the description so students know how possible the opportunity is. Once it is tweaked I can send it to students and the rest of my team.

Thank you for being such a motivated student to help yourself and others:) I am going to share your email with the other counselors in my building to look over as well. We are doing a meeting online this week and we can discuss your information and send you any suggestions. We will also share your website with our Junior Students as well. Thank you so much for sharing your work with us. Stay Healthy,

Kudos to you Mehar. I have been looking for the same type of thing. Manchester High School has a great directory of opportunities on their website, but I think you are on to something. I will forward this resource to our families.

What a great idea. I shared this with my department. Great work! I will do some more exploring and send you any feedback I have, but it looks awesome!

I did look at the HS Navigator website, it looks like it could be a good resource for students, it is not trying to sell anything or charge any fees, the information looks real and legit. Maybe we can add a link to our page somewhere as another resource for students?

Wow, what a cool concept is driven by a young person! I played around with the search feature a bit and I would like to see "armed forces" or "military" opportunities listed. Good luck in your endeavors.

I am a counselor in Maryland. I think you have the beginnings of a great website. I have visited many websites only to get frustrated by clicking on each opportunity and discovering it does not meet the needs or the criteria for my students. It is an extremely time-consuming task. I like the simplicity of your website. I will forward other opportunities so that you can continue to add to it. Kudos to you!

Thank you so much for sharing your resources with us. I have posted it on our website and informed our students about the resource.

Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful tool! It is such a great resource. I am excited to use it with my students. It is such a great idea! Thanks again. Good luck with everything!

Thank you for creating the website so that students can discover internship opportunities, explore scholarship opportunities, and more in one location. I'd especially like to thank you for sharing this knowledge with me and thousands of other counselors to help us prepare our students for opportunities to enrich their lives. Your website is informative and easy to navigate. I shared it with other counselors and advisors and, in effect, my hope is that they will share it. I wish you the very best as you continue your high school career and pursue your dreams!

This is great! Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for the information, I will definitely look through it and pass it along.

Thank you for your email. I will forward this information to my supervisor for final authorization and approval. I will be in touch. Thanks again.

Very nice job on the website…I am impressed. I enjoyed looking at the opportunities for our students, especially those in Massachusetts that don’t have a financial cost All the best!

You did a great job Mehar! Thank for providing this resource for other students.

Good afternoon, Your information is very needed and helpful for others. I would suggest you forward this information to our Garfield’s College & Career Coordinator who would be able to disperse this information to students of interest. Much Success

Excellent website! I will review this soon!

Thanks so much for sharing. We will take a look and see what feedback we can offer. I am hopeful we can post this on the class pages. This summer might be a little unusual but hopefully, students will be able to fully participate in summer programs in years to come. Thanks again

Thanks for the valuable information. Stay safe

Sounds like you've done excellent work, Mehar! Keep it up! I will do my best to provide you with feedback.

Received! Thank you. I will view your website, share your information with my colleagues and students and will provide any necessary feedback. Thank you!

At first glance, this looks great although most students won't be able to use it until next year. The search feature includes upfront details that are most important (description, deadlines, link to the application). Good job.

Thanks for sharing! This seems like a great resource. I will take the time to go through it and possibly publish it for my students. Thanks!

Thanks for the valuable information.