<p>
</p>
<p>Usually by email.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>People are known to do both. The more significant (and more fun!) projects are the ones you come up with on your own, because that way the project is of your own original idea. But in the beginning, it’s hard to find mentors who are willing to sponsor and supervise research, so you may have to volunteer or intern at a lab and work on a mentor’s project to learn the basic techniques and become familiar with the subject area. Both can be great experiences.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You will have to use your own knowledge and creativity when problems come up, or when the results you get do not match the expectations and so on, which happen often when you conduct experiments. Then you’ll have to propose a subsequent step that may clarify the problem, and that may be how your original ideas merge into the mentor’s research.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you are merely working on your mentor’s project, you’ll get credit for some of it, but most of the credit goes to whoever came up with the idea and whoever performed most of the study. When you publish a research paper, the professor usually tags his name at the very end and the person with the most direct contribution assume the first author title. In other words, your mentor is not exactly directly competing against you for the ownership of the study. Besides, most research study are the result of group cooperations.</p>
<p>Also, you will most likely be working in the lab for free, so you can serve as a free source of labor. If you can carry out basic lab procedures well, then that’s a plus for the person you work for because otherwise, he or she may have to hire a technician or ask a Ph.D. student to carry out the study. However, it takes a lot of training to get a high schooler to be able to carry out experiments on his or her own without breaking equipments, and if you don’t do your part well, you’re wasting the mentor’s time and money, hence professors may not want high schoolers in their labs.</p>
<p>Another problem is funding. You want to set up an experiment that’s economically feasible and does not require too much monetary imput.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’ve seen very simple, straightforward studies doing very well in science competitions :). I have a friend who went to ISEF who had never even met her mentor in person before the actual fair, for she did all of her study on her own and only corresponded with the mentor via email to ask for advice.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is quite amazing! Congrats! Why don’t you continue with your current study so that you can build up on it?</p>