<p>Oh, c’mon, @mathyone. I said he came up with the “idea” himself in response to your assertion that lab kids are being spoon fed their projects and there’s no way their research comes out of their own ideas. Your exact words about the lab projects:</p>
<p>“My problem with those was just that I didn’t get any sense that the student had really initiated the project, more like just walked in and been a pair of hands in something that someone else had thought up and planned out in detail before the student ever showed up. Yes, it took hard and careful work to make the project happen, but there’s no way that project came out of the student’s own ideas, the student merely seemed to be serving as an unpaid technician.”</p>
<p>Again, my point was the kid emailed HIS proposed solution to the problem to 200 people. He was not handed an idea that “someone else had thought up” or else his name wouldn’t be on the patent! Now, if you are intimating that his father or mother came up with the idea, that’s a different story and I refuse to go there.</p>
<p>Yes, he had a lot of support in achieving his success but you were complaining about lack of school support before and now you are jumping up and down about parental and lab support. He had a great idea! One that could potentially save hundreds if not thousands of lives and a lab director had the insight to recognize the potential of the idea and let him explore it further. This is how research is done!! That the kid and his brother liked to tinker in their basement and the parents encouraged it. All the more power to them. </p>
<p>As for the mom driving the kid to the lab, I don’t know about her circumstances but I saw she was a nurse, I believe, so her life doesn’t appear to be any easier than the rest of us. I also don’t know about your area but parents where we live drive their kids to piano lessons, gymnastics, travel sports and ten thousand other things. All of our weekends for the past umpteen years have been filled with having to drive all around the state bringing our kids to their travel games not to mention all the local practices. We tend to make sacrifices for our kids, don’t we? I only wish I could have slept in the car instead of having to watch some of those early beeswarm soccer games.</p>
<p>For the kids who come from economically disadvantaged families or live in areas where they don’t have access to resources, colleges don’t expect them to be able to do the kinds of things other industrious kids are doing. For one thing, many of these kids have to work. That is why colleges try to put the achievements of all applicants in the proper context.</p>
<p>This idea that kids working in labs are all just lab technicians is just plain wrong. Last summer, my kid worked with a professor to tackle an enormously challenging problem. He met with his mentor briefly a couple of times a week and the rest of the time he was on his own having to teach himself very high level things in several different disciplines just to be able to think about the problem correctly. He wrote a research paper but is still working on an unsolved part of problem. The professor cannot just “give” him the answer because none exists at the moment!</p>
<p>Finally, if you think that telling the OP to seek research opportunities or try her hand at science and math competitions is bad advice, that’s your prerogative. It is certainly not easy and not for everyone. But the rewards are there, my D also did challenging research which from the process of finding the opportunity to completing it was like going through war. She is now at college though, thrilled to have been able to hit the ground running because of her prior research experience.</p>