Find opportunities worth your time

Why this exists

A student finds a summer programme that looks perfect. They open the application at nine on a Tuesday evening. Forty minutes in they discover it needs two teacher recommendations, an official transcript ordered through the school office, and a 650-word essay — and it closes on Friday.

That is not a rare story. It is the normal experience of applying to things as a sixteen-year-old, and it falls hardest on students without someone at home who has done it before.

So every listing here has an Application Preview: the steps in order, the materials checklist, the essay questions where the organization has published them, the fee, the interview requirement, and an honest estimate of how long it takes. We also show the date we last checked, because requirements change and pretending otherwise would be worse than useless.

How matching works

There is no model here, and no AI. Matching is a set of written rules applied to the preferences you entered, and you can read every reason behind every card.

Pathlumi gives weight to:

• Overlap between your interests and the listing's
• Whether it is a category you asked to see
• Whether your grade is eligible
• How close it is, or whether it is remote
• Whether the cost fits your limit, and whether financial aid exists
• Whether the time commitment fits what you said you have
• Whether the deadline is still comfortably open

Two rules constrain the whole thing. We never recommend something you are clearly not eligible for — an eleventh-grade student is not shown a seniors-only scholarship in “recommended”, though they can still find and read it. And we never estimate your chance of getting in. We do not know, nobody does, and a number invented for that would do real harm to how students choose what to apply for.

For organizations

Nonprofits, schools, universities, research labs, community groups, foundations and companies can post here for free. Local volunteering sits alongside national programmes on purpose: a Saturday morning at a community centre is often the more useful opportunity, and it is the one hardest to find anywhere else.

Posting works like this:

1. Create a provider account and build your organization profile.
2. A moderator reviews the organization before you can publish anything.
3. Write a listing in the seven-step wizard — basics, eligibility, location, dates, cost, the application preview, then review.
4. Submit it. A moderator reads it, and either publishes it or sends it back with a reason.
5. Once live you see how many students viewed it, saved it, and clicked through to your application — as counts only, never as people.

Read the listing guidelines before you write your first one; they will save you a round of review.

What we do not do

A platform used by thirteen-year-olds should be judged as much on what it refuses to build as on what it ships.

• No messaging. There is no way for an adult to contact a student through Pathlumi.
• No public student profiles. No directory, no profile page, no way to browse students.
• No acceptance predictions. Ever.
• No AI-written essays.The application is the student's to write.
• No payments. Pathlumi collects no money from anyone, so there is no payment information to leak.
• No social feed, no streaks, no points. Finding a summer programme should not have a leaderboard.

The full safety approach goes into more detail.

Where the listings come from

The catalogue is a curated, non-exhaustive set of 80 opportunitiesfor high-school students, read from each running organization's own website and last verified on 2 August 2026. Every listing links to the official page and records its sources. We are not affiliated with any of these organizations, and none of them paid to appear here.

Where a programme does not publish something — a fee, an essay prompt, the next cycle's deadline — the listing says so rather than guessing. Many of these run annually and had not announced their next dates when we checked, so you will often see the programme's own wording (“annual winter deadline”) where a date would normally go.

Deadlines, eligibility, costs, and program status can change. Confirm all details on the official website before applying.

Found something out of date? Report the listing — reports go to a human, and we would rather hear about it than have a student waste an evening.