Help Wanted: Teens with Tech Skills.

• Author: GUERNSEY, LISA
• Position: Brief Article

Companies pay lavishly for high schoolers who "breathe computers"

When 18-year-old Eamon Walsh gets together with his high school friends, they chat about concerts, the weather, and--more often than not--their marketing plan.

During vacation, Walsh backs his car out of the driveway before 7 a.m., goes to pick up his friends Tamara Metz, 18, and Thomas Purtell, 17, then heads to work at Evolve, an Internet company in Vienna, Virginia.

Evolve hired the students this summer to develop and sell a new piece of software that allows users in different locations to work on one document at the same time. Among other perks, the company sent them to England, all expenses paid, to learn from other companies. "We thought that was pretty cool," Metz says.

Nice work, if you can get it--and they did, joining thousands of other computer-savvy high school students around the country who are landing part-time and summer jobs with high-tech firms.

SKILLS, NOT AGE

This is the big news flash: Youth is no longer being held against the young. "It doesn't matter if they have a high school diploma or a college degree," says Raj Goel, chief technology officer at Brain Link, an Internet-service provider in Queens, New York. "It just depends on whether they have the skills sets and the experience." His company is willing to offer good money for "true geeks"--people who "breathe computers."

High school students are in demand because of the rise of the Internet and the growth of the computer industry. There's a vacuum out there for computer know-how that high schoolers are perfectly positioned to fill.

Recently, Ted Nellen, who teaches at Murry Bergtraum High School in New York City, received an e-mail request from an internship program.

"We can't fill the spaces," the note said. "Do you have any other kids on your end?"

Another reason high school students are in demand: They generally accept less pay than college juniors or seniors or graduates, yet are often able to do the same work.

But some students are making surprisingly high wages. Tugrul Galatali and Jason Lee of Stuyvesant High School in New York City made enough working for Brain Link last summer to cover a substantial share of their first year's college tuition.

Some students are taking home more money than they know what to do with.

"I'm mostly just sticking it in a mutual fund now," says Xan Charbonnet, 18, who has worked for two summers at Vtel, an Austin, Texas, video-conferencing firm.

BYE-BYE, MCJOB

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