<p>I'm just wondering, say you are an average high school student have no research experience and no particular knowledge in any field, will you be able to do a SURF project at the end of your freshman year? I know this probably varies person to person. What I'm trying to ask is if the core will prepare you for a serious project like SURF?</p>
<p>^I know a ton of frosh who are. It probably depends on the discipline too. Your SURF advisor will probably give you a ton of papers and stuff to read before the summer.</p>
<p>Like fizix said, a lot of Caltech frosh do SURFs, and it's not to hard to get one as long as you take the application seriously and don't do it at the last minute. You won't have any grades yet and it's difficult to get meaningful recommendations from lecturers of large core classes, so it's maybe a little harder to prove you're academically ready. Just make sure you pass all of your classes and get decent recommendations from a humanities professor or a lab/core TA and you'll be fine. Like I said previously, the recommendation from your proposed SURF mentor is the most important one. Do all useful background reading. Caltech has a massive science library and campus-wide online subscriptions to all major journals. Your mentor might want you to take an extra course third term or start your SURF early. As long as you're enthusiastic and competent you'll be good. Whatever you do, don't start your proposal at the last minute! Start several weeks before the due date, get it as good as you can make it, and send it to your mentor to review. Give them at least a week to read it through and mark it up. </p>
<p>Start thinking about finding a mentor near the end of first term. Contact someone, at latest, fairly early second term. I highly recommend frosh take a "pizza course" if possible in their subject so they know what kind of research is going on in their field at Caltech. These courses (Ph 10, Ch 10, ChE 10, E 2, Ge 10, etc.) are just weekly seminars where a professor talks about their research. They give you a better idea what work is going on in labs than just websites and give you an easy opportunity to talk to big-name researchers every week! Warning: not all have pizza, but I don't remember which ones off the top of my head.</p>