Research: with a professor or at a summer program?

collegemom3717
Thu, 16 Feb 2023 09:25:17 +0000

You are trying to read tea leaves

First, AOs give much less weight to having “research” on an app than you may think, b/c so many people have it these days. As with service trips or starting a non-profit, it has been done by so many students, in so many forms, that it has it is now overdone. Fwiw, the ‘in’ thing at the moment is doing old-school teenage paid jobs.

Second, I have been told by AOs that they don’t give particular weight to the ‘pay to play’ options - even the ‘selective’ ones- simply for having done it, partly b/c there are so many, but mostly b/c they give an unfair advantage to students whose families can afford them. A strong essay demonstrating what the student brought to, and then did with, the experience is the plus from the research experience, not the simple fact of having ‘done research at X’. The summer programs whose names carry weight are very few, highly selective- and free to the student.

Third, to the AOs I have known an unusually high end (or early) research or other internship / experience automatically implies connections of some sort- in real life, how else does a 15/16 year old get that role? (There have been students on CC who claim meaningful research work starting in Grade 8). So, NASA not through one of their student programs? some sort of connection- teacher, neighbor, relation, whatever. Again, though, the key isn’t the fact that they have done it, but what they have done with the experience. Note that it doesn’t even have to be a positive outcome: I know a student whose opening to their essay was about how they discovered through their summer research experience that what they thought was their ‘passion’ wasn’t that at all, and that the experience had led them to re-evaluate and make a total change of direction- and the rest of the essay was about what they have done to implement that change. They were very successful in college apps.

ps, you give away your inexperience when you assume that AOs see prestige the way students do: you can’t equate undergraduate ‘prestige’ with subject specific ‘prestige’. At the graduate school level (where meaningful science research happens), reachy-reach schools for undergrad can be safeties for grad school, esp in the sciences.