Hence the “catch” :-).
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So the question is, is there any causality, or is it just that kids that are brilliant enough to get into this program likely would have had equally good outcomes at HYPSM anyway?
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But the exposure doesn’t hurt in personal growth. It is mostly not about college admissions, but about giving access to top researchers in a field so that the kids get to experience real research. Research is mostly failure with occasional success. Kids going into research should get comfortable with that idea. All this process helps. I have a kid who did not mind some kinds of research and minded other kinds of research (where you can spend 10 years without a result). You can start learning about your own personal preferences starting in high school with these kinds of opportunities. My kid now does some research as part of the job.
Even if you are not doing research on your own, being exposed to doing research at some early point in life helps you consume the output of other people’s research more critically.
And the identification by RSI or another similar institution makes it easy for the college to pickup the kid without worrying about false positives
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Well, the headline of the article I responded to was about college admissions.
And I guess it would be another screening tool as you say but that’s relying on (for 4 of the 5) another institution’s screening which seems a little, I dunno, lazy?
Nobody “relies” on it. The numbers are too small to matter when it comes to composing the class. It’s just another datapoint on a holistic review!
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I don’t care about the benefit in college admissions. I want my kid to have access to research opportunities in high school. It has many benefits. The college admission is gravy if it helps.
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Sure, you may not care about admissions and I admire you looking holistically at the experience for your kid, but the topic of this thread and the headline of that article focus on admissions, so that is what I was responding to.
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If colleges are going to look at your body of work, they will also look at what you have done in your field of interest to assess your passion etc, and may take it into consideration on the margin. It is not a bad thing.
This is a fair question. But there is no doubt that acceptance to these types of highly competitive programs are a signal, and a possible way to winnow down the large pool of applicants that the schools we are talking about deal with each year. The results in the CEE and MIT/RSI links above don’t lie and are no coincidence IMO.
Regarding the title of that article…I would just pass that off as an editor creating an enticing clickbait title.
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It has benefits and it has downsides.
You don’t want your kid’s violin teacher forcing them to practice the Brandenburg Concerti while they are still mastering use of the bow. That likely will turn them off the violin, Bach, AND music for a long time. I see this now with the research fetish. Kids who haven’t yet taken statistics (really, the core skill in any research situation) being tasked with things that are way beyond their understanding, even if they can learn- by memorization- what tasks they need to perform. Or kids who claim they are “passionate” about genetics research whose math and chem skills haven’t been built yet. So they’re wandering in a fog of AP Bio terminology without a solid grounding in the building blocks of genetic research.
So these kids discover they don’t like research. Or maybe a 16 year old needs more than an AP class or two before contributing to science. And maybe scientific discovery can continue without having to spoon-feed a teenager before they are ready.
A neighbor of mine is a researcher (PhD, not MD) in an academic medical center. Whenever someone in the neighborhood starts telling him about their precocious kid who is DYING to work in his lab, he responds- very dryly, “I’d be happy to take him/her on. Explain to him/her that I breed mice for a living”.
That usually turns them off. Nobody is interested in a summer breeding mice. Except his mice are “designer” mice, thousands and thousands of them, which have been meticulously created according to a sophisticated set of protocols, genetic profiles, circumstances, etc. It’s at the cutting edge of research into a small area of disease management, and it sounds boring as all get out if you don’t have enough background and years of experience to understand why the work is so important. I think a HS kid who hadn’t taken enough math and science before working in his lab would decide that ANYTHING (making burgers, foaming lattes, folding sweaters) would be better than breeding designer mice.
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It is a bootstrapping process. You learn what you need as you go along. You cannot wait for everything to be in place before you start. This is true even in college. Your advisor will give you a bunch of papers to read to jump start you to get to the leaf of a tree so that you can be somewhat productive right away. Minimal stats is trivial to pickup for a kid who is in 9th grade and above. I’ve seen how this process works. We don’t need to shut the kids away from the boogeyman. Benefits far outweigh the risks.
Whatever the case might be, I shared the info to partially assuage concerns “about students who claim extensive scientific research backgrounds”.
With or without these programs, some top schools are certainly interested in hearing about high school research experiences. In fact, MIT has a special Research Supplement that can be submitted along with the application (as well as other types of portfolios).
The main point always remains: don’t do things for the sake of college admissions.
This is exactly what you should do. To the highest level you can. College applications be damned.
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I respect your opinion. For a segment of HS’ers, whose parental ambition outstrips their own, I think the research fetish is less helpful than you think. And if the kid ends up bored, frustrated, or doing mindless clerical tasks (because the team isn’t getting paid to teach the kid R or Matlab, they’re getting paid to move ahead from year 3 to 4 to get the funding renewed) there are better ways for a kid to spend his or her time. My opinion.
One of the best college essays I’ve ever read was from a kid who worked in world famous Life Sciences lab. It was a “lessons learned” essay which included “why you don’t wear Birkenstocks” (including the mishap involved) and “why you don’t chew gum in the lab” (with the VERY expensive screw up he created with said gum). It was both hilarious and honest- which most “what I learned doing research” essays are not. He now trades bonds, and did not take a single lab science in college to his parent’s dismay.
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This is the root of the problem, whatever particular extracurricular manifestations.
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re: HS and research
Curious if people that doubt incoming 12th graders couldn’t possibly help in labs and work with profs on research are same people who want to know about research opps for first and second year college students? PLENTY of those student are actually at the EXACT same academic level. If you at an advanced STEM magnet or prep school you very well may have take AP chem/physics in 10/11 and and BC calc in 11th… etc. That is same prep as someone starting 2nd year of college, in many cases.
I agree not many HS could ORIGINAL research…but can they work in labs like an undergrad (potentially as well and upper level undergrad?) for sure, many could. One of my kids goes to a school with many STEM superstars that are in upper-level college STEM classes in HS… They are writing upper-level college papers in HS.
Also, I interview kids an alum, and I have met kids doing some interesting stuff in various areas. They can explain it well - one was doing interesting translation and qualtatitve analysis work for a PhD student. Taught themselves an ancient version of a second language they already spoke and then coded for the grad student. Was supporting real research for sure..Half the time I don’t understand the bio research kids do in labs 
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There is a very wide spectrum of ability at the high school level.
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There is a fair bit of a difference in expectations between disciplines that is well-articulated in this piece:)
You may be familiar with high-school “research” in biology, where a high-school student works in a lab over a summer, mostly doing menial tasks like cleaning test tubes, and is rewarded with a paper to publish or to present in science fair competitions. There is a major cultural difference between biology and mathematics. In biology, everyone who is involved in any way on a project is listed as a coauthor, so sometimes author lists run into the hundreds. (See this paper for an extreme example.) But in mathematics, only those people who made a significant technical contribution are coauthors. There is no mathematical equivalent of cleaning test tubes. (We can erase our own chalkboards, thank you very much.)
Still, there are kids that graduate high school having published peer-reviewed math papers. Interestingly enough, you don’t have to have taken statistics to do math research :-).
https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/papers.html
Indeed.
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Also research doesn’t have to be some grand activity. Everybody can benefit from this. Even repeating old experiments (like Mendel’s experiments) in genetics is a useful way of learning the method of science. In our school there was something called journal club. Many kids participated in this. It was voluntary activity. Kids read original research, picked a paper of interest, and presented it to a group of other kids, faculty, and parents. This is a very useful activity — you learn to read and understand research.
My kid went to a college visit at Harvard, signed up to sit in a grad CS class, read the assigned research paper on the phone 5 mins before class time, and had a fruitful discussion in the class he was visiting. The prof did not know this kid was not enrolled in the class, and asked him when he was presenting his project. So seemingly his discussion was not too bad. The ability to read and understand research is independently useful whether you are going to do research yourself or not.
And stuff never goes waste. Some “high school” research he did in bio physics in 10th grade won the team a national recognition. Some of the computer vision literature he read up for this project helped him get a freshman summer internship at an Israeli startup that was putting up boxes at street intersections to read and redirect traffic. Sadly cancelled due to covid.
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I definitely think advanced HS students can potentially do entry-level lab work in the same way many first-time researchers who are college students might. And learn a lot from the experience, in fact.
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