Prizes and Honors
This contest, inaugurated in 2025, asks students in our Affiliate School network to creatively showcase their understanding of American history, civics, and the naturalization exam by proposing a new question for the exam. Each winning student will receive a $500 prize and be featured on the Citizenship Test: Civics and American History webpage. Ten prizes will be awarded.
This prize allows Affiliate School teachers to honor a promising and passionate history student in their school.
High school students attending schools in our Affiliate School Program are eligible for the David McCullough Essay Prizes, which offer $25,000 in prizes for outstanding student writing. Students can submit an original research essay or an interpretive essay focused on a document in the Gilder Lehrman Collection.
The Student Advisory Council is a group of high-achieving students interested in American history. The students provide feedback on existing programs and help the Institute refine its outreach to meet the needs of young people. Students in grades 8–12 can join the council and act as the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s student voice.
The Institute hosts year-round remote internships for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students (as well as recent college graduates). Interns are paid $16 per hour. During the academic year, interns work an average of 10–15 hours per week; during the summer session, they work an average of 15–24 hours per week.
Scholarships and Fellowships
The Gilder Lehrman Institute has partnered with Marist College (Poughkeepsie, NY), with the generous support of the McCormick Family Foundation, to offer scholarships of $10,000 each year for up to four years exclusively for students from Gilder Lehrman Affiliate Schools.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute and the National History Academy are partnering to provide twenty scholarships exclusively to students at schools in our Affiliate School Program. These scholarships, which cover the National History Academy’s four-week residential summer program, include room, board, learning materials, and visits to historic sites.