@ashley676 I’m not positive, but I can’t see that having no research experience in high school would put you out of the running. The vast majority of HS students don’t. I didn’t even know HS students could get research experience until I was a couple months into my senior year, and only found out from ppl online. My HS generally wasn’t very good at telling us about options like that and how to get into college at all lmao.
I think it was Yale’s admission website that said, “Everything matters a little, nothing matters a lot.” It might’ve come fro Yale, but I think it can be applied to pretty much any college decision process. Research experience would probably help, but also probably not any more than other impressive ECs.