<p>Olymom, I am so impressed with your attitude.</p>
<p>PCP, such a wonderful life lesson for your son! </p>
<p>To the OP and PCP’s son, I don’t know anyone from son’s school that entered any of the competitions, and several still are accepted into good research schools. Learning how to do research at that depth is impressive, especially for HS students. PCP son’s teacher offered insight into how judging can be arbitrary.</p>
<p>It’s really hard for kids (or anybody) to be told “you’re just not good enough”. We all just need to develop a little thicker skin and figure out how to learn from our disappointing experiences. Kids who compete in sports and music find this out quite early. Maybe those who do science competitions a bit later. Eventually there will be college disappointments, job disappointments and relationship disappointments. It happens to everybody! The difference is that those who are resilient can go on to experience success.</p>
<p>Olymom, I feel for your hardship and thanks for the wonderful attitude! OP, take note!</p>
<p>bookworm, thanks for the compliment.</p>
<p>“…experience success”. It is important to learn how to define success. Success is not defined by always winning, being 100%, etc. It is not always meeting goals and/or exceeding expectations. You just got a reality check. There are many hugely talented people of your age out there. This does not diminish your talent one bit. There is competition for a limited supply of awards, elite college acceptances, et al. You will benefit from a positive, glass half full instead of half empty, attitude more than from missing what didn’t happen. Take this experience, with your reaction to it, and move forward. It is hard to be among an elite group and fall short of the top- and it doesn’t help for people to point out the many much below you. But, this is a learning experience in more than the research- you will be more mature by having learned how to handle the disappointment. Your life is not over. Spend some free time looking at the credentials of professors at the elite schools- note how many diverse universities they came from. You do not have to be a “hypsmc…” grad to be a professor there.</p>
<p>hypmsc, I know how you feel. I’ve been there throughout highschool. I dealt with constant and oftentimes, disappointing failures. However, to have the will of fire, the heart to never give up is more admirable than countless awards, honors, and recognitions. I killed the SATs, increasing by 300+ through sheer hard work after my huge failure. I missed NMSF cutoff by 1 point. I always come in 2nd places in many comps. in my lives, despite working so hard, but I continued to hope, to persist, to struggle, knowing that the struggle itself maybe in vain. But I know to hope and find self-fulfillment within the very struggle itself. One day it paid off.<br>
btw, u qualified for USAMO…thats like 10 times more impressive than Siemens. and I know several ppl who didnt make Siemens did well in Intel. The judging process is rather cursory (oftentimes flawed)…only 2 weeks for 1400 entries; usually, a research paper takes a lot of time to examine, def. greater than 2 weeks for 1400 entries.</p>