<p>So how do i do this? I have managed to find no mentor; I am all on my own. What do I go on about doing? Help me please! Time is RUNNING OUT! thank you</p>
<ol>
<li>Is there a deadline?</li>
<li>What kind research?</li>
<li>Exactly what sort of things do you expect to accomplish without guidance?</li>
</ol>
<p>Well October, for all the Siemens/Intel competitions.
I need to enter those and I really am open to any category as long as I can do it. So please give me some guidance on submitting a project on my own…</p>
<p>bump…HELP PLEASE</p>
<p>Did you try approaching your teachers? Like a Physics teacher? Or go down to the local CC and talk to some proffs. You will be surprised at how helpful strangers are when they see your passion for learning.
If you can’t find one, first you need to draft a project proposal. Ask a teacher to look it over. You have to have some designs as well. Do you have any group members? You should try to recruit some, it will make the work load lesser.</p>
<p>I did Siemens/Intel and forget the exact paperwork requirements but it makes sense that they would need you to have some adult confirmation in there to be like, yes this isn’t fake. Even though you had no mentor during the research, the best thing you can do now is like SkyGirl said and approach a teacher you know or a teacher whose subject area is concurrent with your type of research, explain what you did to them, show them everything so they understand it and then use them as your supervisor. If you’re still hesitant to do this though you could always contact Siemens/Intel and ask them what to do in this situation.</p>
<p>Thanks. But when i view the “sample” projects it seems like out of this world research and stuff. I mean, its pretty obvious these kids had a lot of help from adults. I mean just the wordings are so esoteric and seem like college/post graduate stuff.
So basically my question is, Where do I start?? I have an idea about a rare disease that I want to investigate, so where do i go now? Am i supposed to be just so smart as to find a cure? or what?</p>
<p>You need mental help if you think that out of the blue, you will find the help that you need on CC.</p>
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<p>You are supposed to be smart and ask one of your teachers/ faculty/staff at your school or anyone who know who can help for help. You won’t find the kind of help that you are looking for on CC. Why don’t you send an email to ask a teacher if she/he would like to become your sponsor/mentor?</p>
<p>I did this in high school (and was fairly successful, winning an award in my ISEF region). My bio teacher signed off on the paperwork, but I did everything on my own. The first thing you need to realize is that you will not be able to research a topic that requires fancy equipment. The second thing you need to realize is that you need to know enough (or be able to find out enough) about the topic to come up with a hypothesis and design an experiment or study.</p>
<p>My most successful project was testing a claim of “magnetic therapy” on a sample of competitive cyclists (I recruited my mom’s friends as study participants). You do not need a fancy-sounding topic to do well, to produce good research. You need an interesting question, good experimental/study design, good analysis, and the ability to do a decent literature review.</p>
<p>Yes, some people get a lot of help. There are even people who are pretty much nothing but hangers-on, cleaning glasses or something in the lab and then sticking their name on a prof’s research. My experience was that good judges could find those people pretty easily. All they had to do was interrupt the kid’s prepared speech to start asking them questions about background material, or methodology, or statistics, or anything other than what the kid had rehearsed. The ones who had done REAL work on their lab’s research got through those fine, and the hangers-on flopped. Meanwhile, the kids with the simple-sounding topics who did their own research generally had no problem with those sorts of questions.</p>