Research: with a professor or at a summer program?

neela1
Thu, 16 Feb 2023 17:51:12 +0000

blossom:

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.

For kids that are academically inclined it is not a bad way to spend time in high school. Among other things they learn about experimental design, and more importantly reading literature and making sense of it. Those are valuable skills. If you are sufficiently motivated, you can even educate yourself on where the cutting edge is in a certain field, how it is being used, and whether you have any interest in it at all, as opposed to what is being taught in introductory high school classes.