Just wondering how to set up an email. Also if anyone has done this before what kind of work did you do because I feel like I wouldnt be that useful. Mainly interested in math (pure or applied) or physics but chem or electical engineering would be cool too.
You are in 10th grade, correct?
I don’t know of any of my friends in research who would take on a sophomore as research “help” because they typically have a lot of current college students who would have first dibs.
Ask your counselors about any Junior Intern programs. My husband’s work had a program for high school kids. They basically shadowed or were “Go-fers” at his engineering firm. Did it help? Son applied but didn’t get into the program, but he did get into his top 10 colleges because he was busy being a kid (athlete, Zoo employee, community volunteer).
Ask your parents if they have work colleagues that can help network you into some junior tasks.
You seem really bent on getting into colleges by doing the “right” kinds of “rehearsed” EC’s.
Colleges will see right through that. The admissions committees like to see people who are involved in their communities. They like to see rigor, but also a passion for a personal hobby or skill. They tend to question when a student doesn’t take advantage of their high school environment to just be a teen.
I would suggest, since you’ve indicated that you will need financial aid to attend a college, that you take on a part-time job for the summer. Part time work is a respectable EC. It demands discipline in that you will be developing your work ethic, working with others, providing a service/responsibility and commitment to a task. Colleges are expensive. You will need funds to attend.
Don’t be in such a rush to have a checklist of what you think the colleges want.
There are students with perfect GPA’s and SATs who build a resume that are rejected every year. Every school admissions committee is different and knows what they want each year in building a class.
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Agree. As college admission competition escalates, it seems that prospective college applicants assume that professors are handing out internships to high school students, but this absolutely is not the case.
I’m in a humanities discipline, not STEM, but I can tell you a little about what professors are doing over the summer. Many of them will be in labs with graduate students, or sometimes undergrads. Those are grant-funded projects, and the grants have very specific conditions to designate funding for research positions, assistantships, etc. These are budgeted already, and professors can’t just add new positions as they see fit. Not only that, but a professor’s first obligation is to their students (and to the agencies funding their grants) – not to high school students looking to pad their resumes. There might also be significant liability issues preventing professors from taking on any assistants younger than college age. And it’s very likely that you do not have the scientific background necessary to make yourself useful in this kind of lab work – a professor’s job is to direct the lab, not teach high school students, and you would probably be behind the curve.
And maybe these professors are not spending their entire summers in their labs – they could be writing up research, writing grants, or traveling for work or pleasure, or presenting at conferences – none of which are appropriate activities for high school research assistants. If you were to email a professor out of the blue to ask for some kind of research position, you’d be lucky to get more than a polite “no.”
So, what can you do to explore math and science? Look for programs designed for high school students. Take a class to bulk up your STEM chops, or participate in a summer enrichment program, perhaps at a program hosted by a college, where you might get some meaningful lab experience. Look for hands-on workshops or shadowing programs. Volunteer at a nature/science museum. Get a job. Any of these would be better than cold-calling professors and expecting something to come from that.
Internships for high school students are uncommon, but possible. After 10th, my daughter was a research assistant in a lab at a top medical school, something she continued the next couple of summers with increasing responsibility. And no, nobody in my family had any connections to people in the lab.
Looking back, I think there were a few things that came together to making this possible.
- A real passion for the field that comes through in the letter. In my daughter’s case, that was neuroscience at the time. Prior to her applying, she had taken classes on biology, genetics, and something else related to neuro. She had done well on the Brain Bee. She had attended a 2 day symposium related to neuro intended for high school students. She had researched the history of how medicine eventually came to understand and properly diagnose PTSD. She was aware of recent research findings in the space. It was a genuine interest this came through in the letter.
- A belief by the professor that you will be a help, not a hindrance. My daughter was willing to do anything when she started, and her first summer was mostly watching experiments and measuring how long particular events took. It was boring stuff for everyone, and the PhD student in the lab was glad he didn’t have to do that. It did get better over time, but she had to pay her dues first.
- A belief that you can keep up intellectually. In her case she demonstrated it through her classes, grades, knowledge of the field, and recommendation from her science teacher.
As a sophomore, you are very unlikely to have the background to help with original math research. When it comes to physics, that’s also true, but they may need help with programming projects related to cleaning or processing data. Data cleansing is boring work that nobody wants to do, but it’s a way of paying your dues.
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I’m in agreement with @hebegebe based on my daughter’s experience. She had several substantial research experiences during high school, starting a bit during junior year, but mainly during senior year.
What helped in her case, however, was likely geography - we live very close to our state’s flagship university, and less than two hours from a top 5 private university. She has done research internships at both of these institutions (including two that were paid). She just reached out to people and mostly heard no (usually because they only work with/hire their own undergrads for these positions, as someone noted above), but there were few who open to it and gave her a chance. She is currently doing an internship at the university she plans to attend in the fall and that internship gave her a pathway into another internship at a government-owned lab where she is currently working on some research projects (and was actually just promoted).
(And I want to emphasize - because I have seen this assumption here many times - we are not wealthy and we have zero family connections. My student did this entirely on her own initiative using her own hustle and determination. Once she began getting a few positions she was able to leverage those to get more opportunities. Parents had no role in this whatsoever, except perhaps by settling in a part of the country that happens to have a relatively high number of opportunities.)
There is also some supporting culture around such internships at her high school: she is part of an academic program that requires students to do a relevant internship outside of school (they actually get Fridays off of classes in order to work at their internships). The school keep a running list of places previous students have interned so that current and future students have some leads for places that are open to hosting high school students. While your school may not have anything formal like that, perhaps it is worth picking your guidance counselor’s brain on the matter?
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If you feel like you won’t be that useful-- you are probably right.
Get a job- any job- learn how the adult world operates. You don’t need to be doing math research for it to be a productive and educational experience. My first job- I tried to switch shifts with someone else because it was the day of my prom and I wanted time to “get ready”. My boss got furious-- I assumed you could just find someone else, then mark the schedule to show who was showing up when. He yelled, “This is capitalism. You don’t work, you don’t get paid. Welcome to America”.
So I learned a valuable lesson (no, it wasn’t about Capitalism.) It was- DON’T ASSUME. Ask.
This is probably the single most valuable thing I could learn as a HS kid. The working world rewards initiative-- but only once you know what the boundaries are. Ask. My next job I asked my boss early on “If I need to change a shift, do you want me to tell you, or just find someone to substitute?” and he said “I don’t care who shows up when as long as the shift is covered”. Great.
So go ye forth and get an education- find a job!!!
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