Best Summer Jobs for High School Students

Working during the summer when school is out of session is a great opportunity for teenagers to make money and gain valuable workplace experience.

Food and drink service jobs are plentiful. Although average base pay is poor, workers who carts tips can do well for themselves. And some national chains have the resources to pay more Starbucks employees can earn about $12 per how on average, and may qualify for a benefits package that includes health insurance.

Grocery store jobs are also relatively plentiful. Although most grocery employees don’t earn tips, base pay is generally above the federal minimum wage—about $12 per hour. Jobs that require workers to operate heavy machinery are inaccessible to workers under age 18. Grocery store employees typically work in shifts, with part-timers polling four to eight hours at a stretch. Peak shopping hours tend to fall on weekends and early evenings.

If you’ve already taken and done well on standardized tests like the SAT or ACT, you can help these students and earn decent pay as a tutor. Tutor pay varies by specialty, experience, and educational attainment. Tutors who themselves are high school students or recent graduates aren’t likely to earn much more than the national average rate of S18 per hour.

Even if you haven’t yet decided what you want your “rear” career to be, high school summers offer the perfect opportunity to test a job you think you’ll like. Summer internships are often unpaid, forcing students to consider whether the opportunity is worth the cost. That’s likely to come down to the value of the experience and the connections that could land you a higher-paying, career-track job down the road.

Heroes Monica and Bryan Davies had only just trained as couriers (递送员) for the charity Anthony Nolan when the coronavirus broke out. But they were determined to volunteer to deliver stem cells to cancer patients, inspired by their daughter Helen’s brave battle with her illness and meeting the selfless stem cell donor who came to her rescue.

Monica, 67, said: “I couldn’t bear the thought that other families standing by a hospital bed, being told the transplant couldn’t go ahead because the stem cells couldn’t get through.”

Helen was diagnosed (诊断) with Hodgkins Lymphoma in 2010. The diagnosis was all the more terrifying as a close family friend had lost their teenage son to the disease a decade earlier, but at first the doctors comforted Helen and said she was likely to make a full recovery.

The doctors said Helen’s age and fitness worked in her favour. They said she would have six months of treatment and she would be fine. But within months of finishing her treatment, Helen’s cough returned and scans revealed a shadow on her chest. Further investigations confirmed the cancer was back.

The doctors used up all treatments except a stem cell transplant from a donor. Thankfully a matching donor was found on the Anthony Nolan stem cell register and Helen had her transplant in March 2014. This time Helen made a good recovery. She wanted to contact her donor, but strict anonymity (匿名) rules prevent patients meeting their donor for two years after the transplant.

As soon as she was allowed, Helen made contact with her donor Ben Potts, from Kent. They quickly became friends and she invited him to her wedding in September 2016.

After that, Monica and Bryan decided to support Anthony Nolan and volunteered to become stem cell couriers when they retired and returned to England.

The couple made three deliveries a week at the peak of the pandemic. They’ve now covered 15,000 miles. Henny Braund, Anthony Nolan’s chief executive said: “Over the last year our volunteer couriers have showed just how committed they are to giving people with blood cancer a second chance of life.”

To communicate with others, we, the people, have different languages. But what about other animals and plants? Well, according to a scientist, plants talk to each other using language.

Jim Westwood, a Virginia Tech scientist, made this discovery by looking at the interactions between a parasitic (寄生的) plant called a dodder and two types of host plants, a small flowering plant and a tomato plant. Dodders use a root—like part to enter their host plants and feed on their nutrients.

In previous studies, Westwood had discovered that during this interaction, RNA molecules (分子), which play a crucial role in translating information passed down from DNA, were being passed between the two species.

And recently, Westwood looked into the possibility that a special type of RNA molecules, mRNA or Messenger RNA, were also being exchanged between the parasitic and host plants, mRNA molecules send messages within cells, instructing them on which actions to take and when. Through this exchange, the parasitic plant may be instructing its host to lower its defenses so that the parasitic plant can more easily attack it.

Besides giving us a much deeper insight into the behaviour of plants, this information could help scientists come up with better solutions to fight the parasitic weeds that threaten food crops. Parasitic plants are serious problems for crops that help feed some of the poorest regions in Africa and elsewhere. In addition, it has exciting implications for the design of novel control strategies based on interrupting the mRNA information that the parasite (寄生虫) uses to reprogram the host.

“The beauty of this discovery is that this mRNA could be the Achilles’ heel for parasites,” Westwood said. “This is all really exciting because there are so many potential implications surrounding this new information. Now that we have found that they are sharing all this information, the next question is, ‘What exactly are they telling each other?’.”

The space community is taking the orbital debris (碎片) threat increasingly seriously these days. Multiple satellite “mega-constellations (巨型星座)” are in the works, making space traffic management and space-junk removal more pressing issues than they’ve ever been.

For instance, SpaceX has already launched more than 1,700 satellites for its Starlink broadband constellation. The company ultimately wants to launch around 30,000Starlink satellites into orbit. One Web has launched more than half of the satellites for its planned 648-member constellation, which may also grow beyond that initial number as time goes on.

In addition, satellite construction costs continue to fall, allowing more and more people to get satellites up and operate them—including folks with very little experience in the field. This opening of the final frontier is generally a good thing, but it further highlights the need for responsible action when it comes to satellite operation. In 2019, for example, the Space Safety Coalition (SSC) laid out a set of proposed voluntary guidelines designed to control space junk over the coming years.

One recommendation is that all satellites operating above 250 miles be equipped with propulsion(推进) systems, allowing them to get away from possible collisions (碰撞). The SSC also recommends operators who control satellites in low Earth orbit should include in their launch contracts a requirement that rocket upper stages should be got rid of in the atmosphere shortly after liftoff.

More active debris-fighting strategies could also be part of the solution. Removing just a handful of rocket bodies or dead satellites every year could help us keep our space-junk problem under control, according to some studies. And researchers around the world are developing and testing ways to do just that, using nets, harpoons(鱼叉) and other methods.

The space-junk issue is a global one, so governments around the world should have conversations about how to deal with it. Let’s hope the talks, the decisions and the tech end up outpacing the problem.