<p>I think it’s a little glib to say she should just do olympiad competitions. Those all require support and cooperation from the school in terms of faculty who are willing to register and pay for the school’s participation, and then oversee the program. Last year, my daughter participated in two different Olympiads, one of them among those you listed. In both cases, she qualified to advance but then was not able to participate in the next round due to lack of support. In one case, no teacher was willing to chaperone her team at the state level, and they simply cancelled the participation without even bothering to ask parents to help out, so I’m thinking they weren’t particularly invested in making it happen. In the other case, she wasn’t even informed that she qualified for the national competition until after it had already happened. The teacher said that information didn’t come in time from the state organization. Not sure what would have happened to it.</p>
<p>mathyone - If your daughter was a son perhaps the school would have acted differently. The discrimination towards STEM interested girls is still part of reality in many ways. Perhaps even here on CC.</p>
<p>See: <a href=“Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? - The New York Times”>Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? - The New York Times;
<p>One of the things the elites look for is how you go beyond the little hs world and any of its inherent limitations. Are you the sort who can branch out, despite? Do you understand the opportunities, wherever they may be, have the vision and energy to seek out experiences? Or, you’re just in that box? (Even if a kid’s hs offers many enriching math-sci activities, this is important.)</p>
<p>When a Yale reviews, that “stepping out” can be an important indicator of how you will, likewise, move forward in college, make decisions, pursue more than what’s done in class. It is one of those things that can come through in many ways. Each time someone posts, “Well, my kid didn’t do x or y,” I know there had to be something that showed that, nonetheless.</p>
<p>Yes, lookingforward, that sounds right, and if my first post came across as “anyone can get in,” I did not intend this.</p>
<p>keesh17, supporting women in STEM is a noble goal. I was afraid to go there. I can easily understand factors in shannon2’s school experience that could make her a late bloomer in STEM. My daughter (sorry to use this example again) was a top math student in 7th or 8th grade, but was advised not to take the most advanced math track because she was too “well-rounded.” So she didn’t. I am grateful for 2 or 3 STEM teachers who patiently encouraged her talents and nurtured her interests, but it wasn’t until junior or senior year that conditions were right for her to embrace such an un-cool thing. I want to offer just an ounce of that support to shannon2.</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>“un-cool thing” in the context of her school</p>
<p>@ddof2 Having watched my daughter struggle with the same issues at her school, I can certainly relate to what you are saying. Fortunately, she was able to ignore the naysayers and eventually prove them wrong but it would have been much easier with their support and encouragement instead of the opposite. Sadly, even in this time of greater enlightenment, many old stereotypes still persist. I am glad your daughter is helping to break down the barriers!</p>
<p>That was a fascinating NYT article, btw. I am a third of the way through Malcom Gladwell’s new book and he talks about the challenges of studying math and science at Harvard or other elite schools. While he talks about the high dropout rates being due to the alienation felt by those not being amongst the top performers. One could easily extend his argument to include the alienation felt by women being so much in the minority in some/most STEM fields.</p>
<p>I will say, however, that if you are a girl who is able to break through the glass ceiling at the high school level and establish credentials in most of the STEM fields, the opportunities for admissions are greater at the elite schools. The challenge once enrolled is to remain committed to the field as the NYT article and Gladwell book illustrate.</p>
<p>There is one big STEM/female issue in our school system, but this isn’t it–I don’t believe the Olympiad difficulties were sex-related. Many of the kids on the team event were boys. It’s more a matter of school priorities. I cannot conceive that any athlete (or participant in a more popular extracurricular activity) who qualified for a state or national event would get so little support from the school. Yet I had no idea some of these apparently big-deal Olympiad and other contests even existed until I saw mention of them on this site in the past few weeks. And our school actually is reasonably good with STEM education, better than most public schools, I think. If the OP is in a much worse situation, it may just be extremely difficult to get these things off the ground. How many schools will authorize forming a club and paying registration fees, and paying a teacher to supervise, and ordering in tests, and setting a time to give them, if there’s only one student who is interested? I don’t mean to discourage the OP from trying, but I think for the many people on this site coming from higher powered schools, it is difficult to imagine that for some kids, it’s not as simple as just showing up.</p>
<p>Mathyone, you are so right. My daughter is a STEM major at Yale, but her public school (and a good one at that, with lots of APs) has great inertia in doing any extracurricular STEM activities. My husband, bless his heart, worked his butt off to get them to give the ACM test in 12th grade, but then they “forgot” once he was no longer pushing it for her. Glibly saying “just do it” does not understand the reality of (most) public schools.</p>
<p>^^ I don’t think anyone was “glibly” saying" just do it". Everyone knows the roadblocks involved in trying to get a research internship and trying to get published, competing in major science fair competitions or doing the AMC, AMRL or the Olympiads. But somehow kids do it. You are right about how difficult it is to get most regular public HS’s to support STEM activities. We experienced it firsthand as well. That is why my daughter had to do her work without much if any help from her school.</p>
<p>There was a recent thread about encouraging gals in STEM, (incl mention of the NYT article.) One of the quotes that struck me was, “I don’t want to be aggressive.”</p>
<p>Here: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1559832-how-underminers-reroute-our-most-talented-girls-2.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1559832-how-underminers-reroute-our-most-talented-girls-2.html</a></p>
<p>@Falcon, the Olympiads are meant to be administered by schools. If a kid can’t get the school on board, there isn’t any way to participate. </p>
<p>Research projects are a different matter, but still, there is a huge advantage for kids who get school support, especially from staff who are experienced with the expectations of these fairs. Professional scientists depend on one another for advice and peer review. It’s a very rare high school student who will be able to think up and complete a project of any value without school support and significant input from a good mentor. I’m not saying it’s not worth trying, because I think success there is the most impressive thing a student can do. </p>
<p>When I visited our local science fair some years ago, it was dominated by two types of project: the vast majority had clearly been done by kids with little to no mentoring, and generally, were not very good. Then there were a few that had clearly been done with heavy guidance in a college lab. 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>@mathyone I am not arguing about either the difficulties of participating in the Olympiads or doing quality research. I do think it is possible to do high-level research without any real school support though. Both of my kids have had to do it.</p>
<p>Also, I think you are being overly cynical about kids not being able to think creatively. Last night, there was a segment on 60 minutes about a 15 year-old kid who has developed a promising test for pancreatic cancer (there isn’t any currently). He researched pancreatic cancer and came up with the test protocol entirely by himself. He emailed something like 200 labs with the details of “his” idea before one took him in. It takes a lot of persistence and hard work but I agree with you that it is one the most impressive things a kid can do in the STEM areas (there are many other endeavors in other fields like art, music, creative writing etc. that are equally as impressive).</p>
<p>This thread is about OP and her desire to get into Yale to study engineering. Does she have the qualifications right now to get into Yale? Perhaps, but I still maintain that she should try to do more things that demonstrate her passion for math and science. It is isn’t easy as you point out but that shouldn’t discourage her from trying. After all, this is Yale we’re talking about. It attracts the very best of the best - kids who have succeeded despite the considerable odd against them.</p>
<p>If by olympiads you’re talking about the qualifying exams for IChO/IPhO/IBO/IMO, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get your school on board as the time commitment is very very very low. I don’t know how it works in the US, but where I’m from, the teachers only needed to supervise one 2 hour exam (and only one teacher in the entire school was needed). Beyond that initial level, the exams were administered by a national authority.</p>
<p>Not everyone gets to Yale by the same hyper-focused path. Apply to a variety of places, be frank honest and engaging in your essay, and let the chips fall where they may. BTW, working in a paid job can be a hook. The elite colleges tend to like those candidates who have worked “menial” jobs…not very many elite college applicants do these days. (Sorry, can’t remember where I read that, or I would cite my source.)</p>
<p>It would be good to know where it came from, as it sounds like encouraging kids to McD’s versus something paid, in their field. Also, because there’s so much misinfo passed on CC, by folks who heard if from someone who heard it from someone else. What I see work is kids who take on legit responsibilities and still keep up their rigor, activities and performance. Think about it.</p>
<p>Just as a note about doing research on the high school level, it really depends on the field. I have friends who conducted experiments in nuclear fusion using parts sourced from their local hardware store and knowledge gained off the internet. For something like medical research where there’s a ton of equipment and facilities necessary, it can be necessary to find a lab that’s willing to take you in, but in my experience this is pretty doable. Most professors are happy to let you use their equipment and provide some general guidance as long as you demonstrate in your initial encounters with them that they won’t have to babysit you, by coming in with a clearly defined research goal that you understand and having basic familiarity with lab techniques. So unless there’s no college or (in the case of medical research) hospital with a lab nearby, any high school student who wants to conduct research and has access to the internet should have no problem doing so.</p>
<p>@falcon, the young man you mentioned has a remarkable achievement, but it’s quite inaccurate to say he did it on his own. His father, a civil engineer, was already mentoring him on research using those tubes to detect properties of solutions. This is a family that has a lab in their basement at home. His mother had the time and commitment to literally sleep in a parking garage every night waiting while her son worked in the lab. (Additionally, the faculty mentor he found at Johns Hopkins was willing to assign a postdoctoral fellow to train him and then supportive enough not to throw him out of the lab when he blew up samples in the centrifuge.) I don’t mean to belittle the achievement of this kid, yes he had a good idea to put two bits of technology together to address a problem he was interested in, and yes, he worked extremely hard and successfully created something that works. It’s very impressive for a high school student. But to say he did it with no support, that’s really not true. This kid had a very involved and technically proficient parent who gave him the very specialized training and materials he started with and most likely was discussing the work with him every step of the way, a postdoctoral fellow who was assigned to help him, and a faculty member at one of the best Universities in the world on his team. Not to mention a mother who was willing and able to drop everything else (does she work? does she have young kids or elderly parents to care for?) to taxi him around. Does the OP have parents like that? I’m not saying the OP shouldn’t try or cannot do anything. But please don’t tell her this other student did it all by himself.</p>
<p>According to the Smithsonian magazine profile,
“he and his father, Steve, a civil engineer, had been using carbon nanotubes to screen compounds in water from the Chesapeake Bay.”</p>
<p>“He and his dad built the Plexiglas testing apparatus used to hold the strips as he reads the current.” </p>
<p>Yup, all by himself. </p>
<p>“In September, Andraka attended high school so infrequently that a few teachers thought he’d dropped out.”</p>
<p>And there is your school support. At many schools, he wouldn’t have been allowed to skip school like that to work on a project. In our school district, that family would have been hauled into court to explain his truancy to the judge.</p>
<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>