We are in CA and I have never heard of this type of program. Of course it’s possible that it might exist in some district (CA is a big state!)
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Our HS has a research class that begins before the start of the regular school day. Some students are published.
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Well, I have family all over the West, so who can be sure🙂
Regarding these research classes in HS, I would make sure they aren’t taking the spot of a core course…maybe that’s why some HSs don’t offer them (limited class periods each day/week)?
I don’t know every college’s policies of course, but some would not count research as a core course (even if the HS might). So for example, if it’s a 3 year commitment, that could significantly impact the number of core courses that a student takes.
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My D’s research project was an extra “9th period” class.
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Right. At my kids’ HS, SciRe was an elective. Kids who chose this knew that it would be their elective for three years. No room for a “fun” course, most likely. It didn’t replace other science classes. For example, my D did SciRe, but also took four years of all core classes: English, science, FL, math, history/social science, etc…
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It’s not always pay to play. When I work with high school STEM students, often they are able to find research in a local college lab just by doing exactly what college kids do - reaching out to profs. You’d be surprised how many profs and post-docs are happy to take on a smart, hard working high schooler looking for research experience.
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Doing research and “publishing” research are different animals.
I can count in one hand how many people I know who have been able to do this as HS student. One of them got recruited when he was presenting his work at a conference once the participants figured out he was still in HS. People who have done research know it’s not difficult, but very time consuming. It takes time to get approval, do the work, write and editing before it makes it to print. Abstracts are quicker but still has standards. For a HS kid, there is just not enough time to complete the process or even be along for the ride.
People well connected to some faculty can get their names in print. I have heard of at least one person, but that’s hearsay. People who do that do not talk about it.
It’s not impossible to go to a lab as HS student. But 99.99% of them will not get their name in print. I would say the people looking to pay their way to get published, they are walking a fine line.
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My kids’ HS has Science Research, which is a one-year elective course that can be repeated (I think humanities research topics would be covered under AP seminar). D23 did it for two years – it’s considered an independent study, so it counts as a class but doesn’t take up space in the schedule. Students work with a mentor to propose a project, create the research protocol, write up the experiments and findings, and present at regional science fairs. It’s possible to build on the original project in the second year, or to do a second project. Especially advanced projects are given honors credit. The goal is to develop scientific skills and pursue scientific interests – definitely not to get published in a peer reviewed journal or such. It’s possible that some students use a more professional or academic lab setting for their projects (those who have connections), but the primary mentor is a high school teacher. So it sounds like something along the lines of what @Lindagaf is describing, but these kinds of courses might be specific to specific schools.
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Yes, my D25 secured a summer lab research assistantship position at a university with a professor this summer. Details are not yet finalized, but I believe it will be paid.
D25 currently has a desire to get a PhD and conduct research. I look at this summer’s opportunity as a low risk way for her to gain some exposure to life in a lab. She has somewhat similar experiences the past two summers but this will likely be the most intense.
While the professor is conducting real scientific research, D25’s 6 weeks in the lab will not be a major contribution towards publication. Rather, the goals for the summer are to gain an appreciation of lab life, possibly connect with the professor from a mentor perspective, gain insight into career possibilities, learn to wake up on time and commute 45 minutes to a job, etc.
The kids I’m talking about always get their name on the research paper the team worked on, since they contributed. So not first author. First author I usually only see as it relates to a state or national level science fair project student. But I’ve seen a number of students get the opportunity to present at conferences on the research projects they worked on.
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Same with my daughter - she is listed on the publication, but obviously not as the first author 
I’ve been surprised at how this seems to be growing more common and I have to admit, I am skeptical of the quality of the experience when I see it. I guess I don’t really understand why so many professors running research labs would NEED high school students when they usually don’t even have room for all of the undergrad students who are interested in research (especially the professors who have postdocs and grad students to supervise, as well). My husband has a research lab and it takes a lot of time to train students before they are capable of doing any of the hands-on aspects of the research on their own–just one summer or one semester is not enough time to accomplish anything with the kind of research he does, not to mention that any mistakes can be VERY costly and waste huge chunks of grant money and time. One wrong move with some of the samples he works with and you’ve added months to the project and lost thousands of dollars. Also, the kind of research he does is difficult for undergraduates to comprehend without a ton of advanced pre-req courses…it would be unheard of for high school students to be at that level.
There is also the issue of permissions for minors to even be in the lab space–it requires special approval and it’s rare to see that happening for more than just a one-off lab demonstration visit.
The only exceptions to working with high school students at his university involve the following two scenarios:
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His university offers grants to professors to run a short 3-4 week program for promising high school students (usually from an IB program or collegiate academy) that introduces them to research. The goal is not to actually DO research though, it’s more to learn about research and practice lab techniques and to introduce them to the opportunities that the university provides. It’s meant to be used as as recruiting tool to try to keep local kids from looking elsewhere when they apply to colleges and they pay professors to take it on for this reason.
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One of the magnet high schools in the area requires seniors to complete a thesis and all students are required to find someone outside of the high school that works in the field they are interested in to agree to supervise their thesis. Sometimes the students will convince professors at one of the local universities to supervise their thesis, but it’s still unlikely they would be invited into a lab to conduct hands-on research with expensive materials. It tends to be more like, a writing professor supervising a student’s poetry thesis, or a psychology professor advising a student on running their survey. The time commitment required has to be pretty minimal for them to usually find a professor willing to take it on.
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I agree with Cam’s fine post.
I will add one more concern- I see the kids adrenalin rush after their “Research” position and in almost every instance, it gives a very unrealistic picture of what “research” actually is. Kid observed, contributed to, made a “major” contribution to a tough problem. So intoxicating. Kid showed up in year 4.5 of a 5 year grant so of course it’s intoxicating. But the last six months of a multi-year project is not representative of the thousands of hours that the actual research team spent doing the “boring” stuff (i.e. foundational work which is critical for ANYTHING to be replicable).
This holds both for lab work (where honestly, what do you have that’s publishable in the early stages?) and other types of research. You’re working with a multi-disciplinary team exploring voting fraud-- political scientists, mathematicians, psychologists, computer scientists. You show up in the final inning as the hypotheses have been tested and retested and the data has been run 6 ways to Sunday- of course it’s exciting! But the HS kid wasn’t there in the early months when the infrastructure was being built- do we want census data by zip code or is that too granular? Do we include congressional districts which are now being challenged in the court and will likely have their populations changed this year, or exclude them so the data isn’t “muddy”? Do we accept the data which is available by each secretary of state in terms of gender, age, party affiliation ,etc. or do we need to work county by county to get the raw numbers and then do a regression analysis to examine whether the statewide data is accurate?
I get why every kid who comes out of one of these experiences wants to “do research”. But ask any doctoral student in year 4 how much they loath (not every day, but some days) what they are working on, and what the burnout rate is like on their team.
So a manufactured “show up, get results, we can publish” (or show up at a conference) is a highly unrealistic way for a HS kid to understand the long, slow, laborious way that actual, replicable research is conducted.
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They probably don’t NEED them. Instead, some profs are giving an opportunity and taking on a mentorship role. Sure, someone else could certainly do the work the high schooler is doing. But in some cases, profs see a spark they want to nurture and so invite a high schooler to gain experience with them. Now as a college freshman she actually just got another opportunity for a research-to-publication position with a different professor at the same university (not the university she attends, but local to us). Sometimes profs like to mentor young people and the latter can be of assistance, often doing the less glamorous work that the prof and/or accomplished grad students prefer not to do (reviewing citations, scrubbing data, etc.) but that needs to be done by somebody. In return, they gain exposure and experience with other aspects of the research project through collaboration with the research team and mentorship by the prof. She also helped with the revisions following peer-review feedback - it was tedious and frustrating at times, but she learned a lot from the process.
The research (that led to a publication) that D did as a high schooler wasn’t in a lab. It was social sciences, not hard sciences. She did need to do HIPAA and CITI certification, though, which she was able to do as a minor. That was all.
Second semester senior year she did get an internship at a US government lab (now as a college freshman, she is still interning there). That is lab-based research. She needed to do some security stuff I remember - they took her passport and finger prints and created an ID that would allow her entrance to the facility, but that was it and she was able to do that as a minor.
It took D a few months to be trained to run experiments at the government lab, but since then has generally been running them independently. She has made mistakes and learned from them, and has always been told that others in the lab have made similar mistakes. No one has taken the attitude that she is not capable and doesn’t belong there. But, I mean, she’s not doing brain surgery. (And this is not research that is related to a publication of any sort.)
Sure, some may not find this experience to be valid and that’s fine. My D has learned a ton from it, though, probably more than she has learned from many of her classes, and that’s what makes it valuable, imo.
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I think the disconnect for me is selecting high school students over undergraduate students. Sure, I guess if there aren’t a lot of undergraduate students interested in the research opportunities, I can see how some professors may feel they have the capacity to take on high school students. But in my experience, there are just so many eager and willing undergrads who want the opportunity that many great candidates are turned away. Not to mention that higher ed asks so much of professors in terms of community service and outreach to help with admissions and marketing…adding on supervising high school students in addition to undergrads, grad students, and postdocs is quite the time commitment.
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I guess this must vary by school. My D did lab research at our local T20 uni (real lab activities including harvesting certain body parts from baby chicks) and she was one of five HS students in just this lab. There were also other HS students in other labs, so I assume these profs/lab employees couldn’t get enough undergrads…but I don’t know that for sure. Students from multiple HSs were working on campus, so I guess some could have been thru formal programs, but I don’t know that either.
It was great experience for her, including being exposed to a huge mistake that set the experiment back in a big way. She learned thru this experience that although she loved science, she wouldn’t want to work in a lab for her career. She majored in neuroscience in college and went into the business world when she graduated last year.
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Wow, that does sound like a high level of high school students involved. It could also vary by field/type of research too in terms of how in demand it is for undergraduate students.
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Absolutely. Research involves a LOT of boring tasks. So much of it is boring, but it’s all about the end result. I’m actually amazed my kid has remained in research. She hates being bored. 
I am the only one of my siblings without a doctorate. Therefore, I was the go-to for the tearful phone calls “I can’t believe I’m doing this”. I’d point out that corporate life ALSO had some routine and boring elements (filling out expense reports? Doing 360 degree assessments of your team? redoing the same budget variance analysis ten times because the CEO wanted to see “what happens in a zero inflation world” whereas the CFO insisted “what happens when interest rates rise”, etc.)
That would help for about a minute… and they’d go back to the loathing. Also “My advisor hates me” which was a persistent them by about year 4!