High School Research Opportunities

coffeeaddicted
Fri, 07 Aug 2015 04:21:15 +0000

There are other research opportunities that don’t require high-tech equipment. Many high school students without access to labs often do analyses of existing data, looking for patterns and investigating the causes of such patterns and correlations. There are public catalogs of data, especially in the physical sciences (i.e., star catalogs for astronomy). If psychology is your interest, you can complete surveys in your school or community that provide insightful and new data, as long as you do the research to learn the background, i.e. through google scholar if your school doesn’t have courses (for any research you do, tbh).

If you have a university near your home, there’s no harm in asking a professor if you can assist with research in their lab with an informal internship, if you have taken classes in your preferred field. These can be great opportunities (in my internship, I was the only high school student in the lab and got to learn how to code for data analysis of an experiment. Now I’m being published in the paper and possibly presenting my work at a conference).

If you have a good enough background in your field and have a great research proposal, you can also email professors from local universities for use of their lab space.

Don’t be limited by your school or the tuitions of these science programs. If you want to pursue science, there are ways to do so