Value of unpublished research

molliebatmit
Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:29:36 +0000

Rather than the normal route of formulating some idea and finding a professor to support it, I searched through the research going on at this university, found a professor with an interesting research focus, and managed to acquire a research position with him. (So there goes creativity and originality)

I would actually posit that this is the normal route, particularly in the sciences. Even graduate students and postdoctoral fellows don’t come up with brilliant ideas and find professors to support them – they join a lab, then come up with a research topic together with the professor.



I most likely won’t get anything published, and my research isn’t anything groundbreaking, as you would see in Intel/Siemens. All I will potentially have is a recommendation from my mentor.

Vanishingly few high school students actually get published. Not very many college undergraduates even get published after working in labs for two or three years. (I’m a graduate student, and I haven’t published in my PhD lab after three years here.) It takes a long time to publish, and whether or not you publish isn’t necessarily indicative of the effort or novelty of your research.

Nobody is expecting you to publish something as a high school student – the point is more to learn about the process of science and hopefully to get you excited about your topic or research in general. The value is in doing research, not in any tangible outcomes.