As two high school sophomores, we discovered something all of us face at some point in our academic careers. To get into what's deemed a "good" school, you need thousands of volunteer hours, clinical experience, and research experience (with a side of 18 nonprofits). We noticed a problem: nobody actually tells you how to do any of this; they just throw you in the ocean and expect you to float. There's no compass or database that lists programs made for someone our age, just a vague expectation we should already know as confused teenagers who are already stressed-out high schoolers as it is. So we did what any confused high school students would do: we researched it ourselves. We spent hours digging through career paths and salaries and finding volunteer, shadowing, and internship programs that actually accepted high schoolers. Then we realized: if we were struggling to find these opportunities, other teenagers were too.
That's how we started Med4 TeensByTeens: our student-led initiative. What started out as two sophomores trying to figure out opportunities we felt we desperately needed before the age of 16 transformed into a platform built to help other teens skip the confusion we went through. We're not doctors, counselors, or admissions experts; we're just students who've been exactly where you are, doing the research so you don't have to do it alone.