Here are some of the best questions for a high school senior student survey about internship and work experience, plus tips on how to create them. If you need to build one fast, you can generate a survey with Specific in just seconds.
Open-ended questions to ask high school seniors about internships and work experience
Open-ended questions help us capture detailed stories, challenges, and motivations — all the context you just can’t get from a checkbox. They’re best when you want in-depth understanding, new perspectives, and actionable insights, especially for topics as nuanced as internship access and workplace preparation.
What motivated you to pursue (or not pursue) an internship during high school?
Can you describe your most valuable learning from any job or internship you've had?
What challenges did you face while trying to find internships or part-time work?
How did your school support (or not support) your search for internships or work opportunities?
What skills do you wish you had gained from your work or internship experience?
If you haven’t had an internship, what were the main barriers?
What advice would you give to younger students about getting work experience?
Can you share a time where work or an internship changed your goals or interests?
How did your experience impact your college or career plans?
What would make internships or work experiences more accessible to students like you?
Open-ended questions matter. Studies show that AI-assisted conversational interviews, which rely on open-ended formats, collect richer, more detailed survey data and can uncover unexpected insights that lead to better decision-making [6].
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for high school internship and work experience surveys
Single-select multiple-choice questions are best when you need to quantify experiences or give students an easy “way in” to the conversation. For high school seniors — especially if time is tight — structured options can encourage response and make the survey less daunting. These questions are also perfect for sparking a follow-up if more depth is needed.
Question: Have you ever had an internship or job during high school?
Yes, internship
Yes, job (not internship)
No
Question: What was your biggest reason for seeking work or an internship?
Financial need
Career exploration
School requirement
Other
Question: Did you find it easy or difficult to access internship or job opportunities?
Very easy
Somewhat easy
Somewhat difficult
Very difficult
When to follow up with "why?" When a student selects an option that’s meaningful (e.g., “Very difficult”), that's your cue! Follow up with, “Why was it difficult for you to access internships?” This opens the door to stories you won’t get with just the options. Follow-ups paired with single-selects are a proven way to balance scale and depth, and platforms like Specific automatically handle this seamlessly.
When and why to add the "Other" choice? Always add “Other” if you think an option might exist outside your list. Follow-up questions on “Other” responses can surface barriers or motivations you never predicted, making your findings more actionable and less biased.
NPS-style question for high school senior internship feedback
Net Promoter Score (NPS) isn’t just for businesses—it works anytime you want a gut-check on overall advocacy or satisfaction. For high school internships, an NPS-style question gives a quick read on whether students would recommend certain programs to peers. This’s especially valuable given that only 2% of high school students completed internships, despite proven long-term benefits like higher salaries and post-grad success [1][2]. Try it yourself with Specific’s NPS survey generator.
NPS Question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend participating in an internship or work experience during high school to other students?”
Follow up: “Why did you give that score?”
This sets up powerful data you can track year over year, or compare between student groups.
The power of follow-up questions
If you skip follow-up questions, you risk shallow or unclear answers. Automated follow-ups are the ace here — they gently dig into vague responses in real time, just like a thoughtful interviewer. With Specific, smart AI follow-ups adapt live, creating a survey that feels like an authentic conversation.
High school student: “I got my internship through a friend.”
AI follow-up: “Could you share how your friend helped you find the opportunity?”
How many followups to ask? In most cases, two or three focused follow-ups are enough. You want clarity and detail — not exhaustion. Luckily, Specific lets you set a maximum, or skip to the next question as soon as you get what you need.
This makes it a conversational survey — responses are naturally richer, and participants feel genuinely heard compared to static forms.
AI survey analysis, unstructured insights, automatic summaries — even if you collect lots of free-text responses, you can easily analyze survey responses using AI. It removes the pain of trawling through open-text data by hand.
These new automated followup features are cutting-edge. Generate a survey and see how this technology transforms the feedback experience — it just works.
How to prompt ChatGPT for the best high school student survey questions
You can co-create a killer survey by simply prompting ChatGPT or any generative AI. Start basic, then add context for even fresher, more targeted questions.
First, use:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for High School Senior Student survey about Internship And Work Experience.
For better results, give more context about your goals and audience. For example:
I’m creating a survey to learn what helps or blocks high school seniors from gaining work experience. I need nuanced questions that dig into access barriers, motivations, and how these experiences shape their futures. Please suggest 10 open-ended survey questions.
Next, ask ChatGPT to sort them:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Then, for any category you want to go deeper on, say:
Generate 10 questions for categories [Access Barriers], [Motivations], and [Impact on Future Plans].
What makes a survey conversational?
Conversational surveys mimic real conversations, not rigid forms. They ask, clarify, and react—so you get context, not just clicks. With AI-powered survey generation, you’re not stuck scripting every possible angle: the AI handles nuance, follow-ups, and tone, letting you focus on what matters—the insights.
Manual Surveys | AI-generated Surveys |
|---|---|
Static, fixed questions | Dynamic, conversational questions |
No real-time clarification | Smart follow-ups based on responses |
Slow to create and edit | Instant edits with AI survey builder |
Hard to analyze long answers | AI distills and summarizes responses |
Why use AI for high school senior student surveys? The research backs it up: conversational, AI-powered surveys elicit richer, more detailed responses than traditional forms—improving both the breadth and depth of your data [6].
If you’re starting from scratch, our step-by-step guide will walk you through the process.
With Specific, you get best-in-class user experience for truly conversational surveys—respondents actually engage, not just click through the motions.
See this internship and work experience survey example now
Don’t wait to level up your student insights—see the difference a conversational survey makes. Create richer feedback and analyze results with AI in one go.