Research: with a professor or at a summer program?

blossom
Thu, 16 Feb 2023 16:57:13 +0000

MW, I was NOT responding to your post, but since we agree, no harm no foul!

The “fetishization” of certain activities among a certain group of parents and students is fascinating to me. Whether it was building houses in Haiti a few years back (meanwhile, there is a city 20 minutes from where I live where housing instability, homelessness, and a crumbling housing stock means they are perpetually looking for Habitat volunteers), starting your own non-profit to address the underfunded issue of “how to make a gluten free donut for those with celiac”, or now- research-- it’s just fascinating.

First of all, most HS kids don’t want to hear that there are actual skills that need to be attained before you can be valuable (or even helpful) on a research team. So whether it’s learning R or a specialized software program-- nope, they want to be curing cancer, not logging notes for the team. Second, most HS kids don’t realize that “research” doesn’t come in nice bite-sized portions. A team could be funded for a 5 year grant-- where all the exciting stuff happens in the last five months- but that mean 4+ years of “drudgery” and foundational work-- and if you are staffed in year 2, that’s a LOT of drudgery! Third, most HS kids would rather work on the sexy stuff (anything with the words Robotics, BioMedical, and of course- Cancer) and not what happens every single day at every university and research lab in the world- which might be a study on plastic residue in plankton or fertility rates in frogs or poring through the latest census data to understand food insecurity in rural zip codes.

But so many interesting ways a HS kid can spend their time…