Correlation doesn’t mean causation - isn’t that what you just said above? There are tons of families working to make ends meet that run their kids to practices, to tournaments, to research, to karate, to whatever, after school. Most are not affluent. Most are just trying to support their child’s interests to the extent that they can.
Words like ‘affluent’ and ‘privilege’ have been totally discounted today. It is wrong to hurl these terms at everyone who didn’t come from a tragically broken or destitute household.
There are researches and there are “researches”. The purpose of research is to discover, and to understand and explain that discovery. Most, if not nearly all, “researches” by HS students don’t meet the criteria. They’re good activities, like many other good activities, for the students to participate in, but I don’t think AOs favor them over other good activities because they, for the most part, can’t tell how original, how independent, how meaningful the research is (other than in a few special situations).
This I agree with. And because AO’s cannot tell how good research is, they rely upon external validation.
Most often this external validation are the national STEM competitions. But without that, if the AO suspects that the research is really strong, they will send it over to the appropriate faculty for a review. A third source of external validation, but not as strong as the first two, is a recommendation letter or email from a faculty member who has met with the student and reviewed the research, perhaps during a campus visit. This may prompt a formal review by another faculty member.
These was an AMA done by a former Stanford AO on here, which was very interesting. A lot of these AO types move on to more lucrative things like college counseling.
This person was very honest. Basically, you have to find something that differentiates a 1500++ kid from another 9 applicants. That something can be research or another activity.
Whether research helps you or not in college admissions ( and I believe it does), it certainly helps you in college thereafter. You have some sense of where the state of the art is in your field, you know how to read and interpret literature etc
Our school has capstone/internship requirement for senior year - they work a few periods twice a week and contribute to research and then present at end of year. Two alumni who went to in state university came back to talk to students - both were offered and accepted jobs after college at the places they interned.
I’m curious about why you are specifically recommending that high schoolers do arXiv submissions. That is a pre-print server basically restricted to math and physics research. The idea is that you post your manuscript there while you’re waiting for it to go through the peer-review process to be eventually published. That way people can read it and cite it in the meantime.
A high schooler would need to have done the research with a senior scientist at the least (generally a college professor). Usually a HS student wouldn’t have much interaction with the prof and would be supervised by a PhD student or postdoc. While they might be listed as an author, the HS student would have little to no control over the writing and submission of an article. This is the same type of process for peer-reviewed publications.
Your kid is seriously impressive for being the main author of scientific publication(s)! I can assure you that is so far from the norm that I have literally never heard of it happening. So it’s probably out of the realm of reasonable for other kids. It would be an ethical violation for a high school student to submit their research to arXiv without the full permission and supervision of a senior scientist, so I’d hate to see a kid try to go down that road.
You make an important point.
There are several ways for kids to “publish” in open access, pay-to-play journals of no impact.
This practice is to be avoided.
I know about this as a judge in many local SR competitons, Inwonder if college AOs know what a ruse these are?
If a HS student can contribute to the work of a lab in a meaningful enough way to be listed anywhere as an author on a paper accepted to a real academic journal of even the lowest impact—this is huge.
Working in a lab should not be conflated with performing scientific research.
It was quoted upstream that:
“Penn mentioned in their class of 2026 profile that ‘Nearly one-third of the admitted students engaged in academic research during their time in high school, many earning national and international accolades for research that is already pushing the boundaries of academic discovery’.”
I interpret it as these students worked in labs, (making buffers, washing glassware, pouring gels …) rather than these students were major investigators in the labs. I’d wish that Penn were more clear on this, and more importantly, that they (and we) recognize the differences.
I think you should make a distinction between lab oriented research, and research in areas like Math where the rare high school student can make individual contributions.
Most aren’t ‘major investigators’ but many people might be surprised at the research activities HS students are doing…it’s far beyond washing beakers and such. I have many examples, but my D was harvesting retinas from baby chicks at a t20 lab as a HS junior.
I also agree with neela, there is a lot of non-lab research happening too.
My son’s papers were in math. I didn’t know arXiv was restricted to specific topics, as the website talks about biology and many other fields. But I see that most of the recent papers are in physics, math, or CS.
And of course, a submitted paper needs approval or the professor.
Again, I don’t think that the AOs look at something and say “Wow, amazing research, let’s admit based upon the quality of this research”. I know my child’s research was reviewed by a faculty member at his college.
That’s hardly the only two choices. As someone who saw this firsthand with my son and his peers, my view is that the projects significant enough to “move the needle” at elite colleges are those that would be respectable projects for graduate students at their university, the type that may result in a paper. And the peer-reviewed journals I am talking about are not at the level of Nature or Science, but something that may have an h-index of about 20-40.
I also thought of this. Pay-to-play is a big problem, and it can often take a little effort even for PhDs to sort out which journals are predatory. Usually if it doesn’t pass the smell test (hunches are not very scientific criteria, LOL), I spend several minutes googling to confirm that is is indeed a pay-to-play pub. It might be on a list of predatory journals, or it might not be indexed by PubMed, or you might have to look at the editorial board and even skim the table of contents to figure it out. Not super hard for a trained person, but I don’t know how an AO would figure that out! UGH.
Though pre-print servers such as arXiv are legit, and I use them myself, we saw during the pandemic how some people can misuse them to give an air of legitimacy to unscientific work. Many of the covid manuscripts that were posted on biorXiv were total BS and will never pass peer review. That is a violation of how the preprint servers are supposed to function. Most people post the same manuscript to the server that they submit a journal for peer review, often on the same day.
People who understand research know this is true, indeed! It’s a big achievement even for undergrad students, let alone HS students.
Which leads to this:
I agree it’s unlikely that 1/3 of Penn’s admitted students did meaningful academic research. Spouse and I are both science profs with kids who want to study science. I wouldn’t dream of placing my kid in someone’s lab. We asked S23 once if he was at all interested in doing research or science fair projects. He wasn’t super interested, so we never mentioned it again. If he was absolutely gunning for it, I might have helped him figure out what kind of a science fair project he wanted to do, or made some suggestions on finding his own way into working in a lab. This all would have been limited to answering his questions, not getting involved in any of the actual work or doing any networking.
That is true. Math and some other theoretical/computational fields are exceptions given that they require nothing more than a brain and some paper and maybe a computer. Though they could submit something on their own, any kid smart enough to contribute something novel in those fields should go find a prof to mentor them and open doors!
Because I run an academic research lab, I am very familiar with HS research. It would take a truly extraordinary HS student to make a meaningful contribution in a lab in most fields. The ones who are placed in labs as part of a special HS program can sometimes fare better, especially if they’re there over a longer period of time. It is hard even for undergrads to make meaningful contributions to research.
I think that the HS-specific venues for research are great (science fair, competitions, etc.), and students should definitely participate in those. Doing “academic research” in HS is down to privilege and parental shenanigans for all but the most incredible high schoolers, or those involved in special programs that match them into labs.
He is an example of one of the truly brilliant students. It is so incredibly exceptional for a high school student to have a sole-author publication.
From his wikipedia page: “Pardon’s father, William Pardon, is a mathematics professor at Duke University, and when Pardon was a high school student at the Durham Academy he also took classes at Duke.”
While I’m sure the work was all his own, I seriously doubt he would have had a sole-author pub as a high schooler without a math prof father giving him advice, and having taken college classes.
A HS student might help by participating in such projects, but there is just no way they are grad-student caliber. A graduate project literally takes years of full-time work, not to mention the specialized classes they take in undergrad and grad school. A HS student can help with a project that results in a paper, but it is almost unheard-of for them to be the primary author of the study (e.g. the one who has done most of the work and has written the paper).
I’m not sure what you mean by this. An h-index is applied to a person, not to a journal. Are you talking about journal impact factor instead? In that case, 20-40 is indeed glamorous level (like Nature or Science).
Nature defines potential, and nurture can help fulfill that potential. There is no doubt that parental involvement played a big role in John Pardon being able to do that by high school. If your point is that the privileged have a better chance to develop their potential, I am in full agreement. But the underlying talent was clearly there from the beginning.
It’s definitely done under the guidance of a professor, but the HS student is doing the work. What my son worked on was not a summer project, but something done throughout high school, taking 10-20 hours a week. The first year was spent on reading existing literature to understand the particular area of mathematics he would be working on. Some people only do two years and get perhaps one paper out of it. He did freshman through senior, and therefore was able to do more.
I would estimate there are a few dozen students at or above this level each year. One of the strongest that my son knows seems to be on par with John Pardon’s level in terms of accomplishments by high school.
I’ve seen h-index used for both, but you would know better what the best metric is. For example, here is one site that shows the h-index for the American Mathematical Society is 100, and the impact score is about 3. On this same site, the journal my son published in showed an impact score between 0.5 - 0.6, and an h-index of about 40.
Old school researcher here (i.e. first conference publication end of undergrad, first journal publication three years into PhD research). I have pushed back on the published high school researcher concept before on CC with little success. When I saw the title of this thread I thought to myself “is it worth it to engage in knee-surgery, establish monetary policy, insert any professional high-skill job, in high school?”
Eventually I think it comes down to semantics. My daughter completed three “research” projects in high school based on collaborations with her teachers, peers and experts in the different fields. She wrote three papers and was first author on all of them. She never mentioned any of this in her college application because she knows what research is like from her parents. Maybe she was wrong to not include these things. She is now involved in research at a lab in her university with a professor that is very very old and has an amazing system of training young researchers in place. She got lucky to land in his lab working with his postdocs. My guess is she will not get a publication out of this even if she continues working there for all four years of undergrad and that is perfectly normal. She knows this. A lot of freshmen leave the lab when they realize that a name on a publication is not automatic once you sit your bum behind a microscope or tweak some parameters on a molecular dynamics simulation, for example.
My most impactful paper was that first one in grad school. I’ll let the commenters of this thread guess why. Whenever I see my old advisor he teases me that by the time we both retire I will have taken him over in paper with the most number of citations. I kindly remind him that there is one other name on the paper and that is his. I also have a paper of mine taught in an undergraduate class at MIT. I’m as proud of that accomplishment as the “citation king”.
As for the high schoolers and research. Of course engage in research if that interests you. I used to be able to host high schoolers over the summer and I met some great kids that way. None of them are coauthors on publications. One of them is a researcher ten years later and we still keep in touch.
Old school opinion again, but taking opportunities to learn about a profession that might interest you does not make you a professional in that profession. I volunteer to peer review publications in my field listed in college apps. Any takers?
Yes, John Pardon is clearly a super genius. My point was to say how exceedingly rare he is, and to also say that even such a super genius would likely not know how to go about publishing a sole-author peer-reviewed paper without some guidance from a prof (his dad, in his case).
As I said in an earlier comment, your kid is seriously impressive if he was the main author of publications as a high schooler. Math is also a bit of an exception since it requires no equipment or funding and sole-author publications are common in math. In other non-theoretical scientific fields, you can’t typically complete a grad school caliber research project by working 10-20 hours a week for a couple years, even if you have already have completed the necessary background coursework. So your truly exceptional child, working in math, with a professor, for 10-20 hours per week for 4 years, being the primary author on pre-prints? He may have approached grad-level with that project. That is truly exceptional and those are the rare kids I’m talking about.
I don’t know what’s up with that website, but it’s wrong about h-index. H-index is, by definition, associated with an individual person and not a journal. Most researchers will achieve an H-index of 20 sometime after they’ve been tenured. That means they are an author on 20 different peer-reviewed papers that have each been cited at least 20 times by other peer-reviewed papers. As for impact factor, most scientists will not publish in a journal with an impact factor >20 in their entire career. Though I know many that have, I have not, and I doubt I ever will, since I don’t even bother submitting papers to those journals.
I think it’s worthwhile coming back to the original question of this thread: How important is engaging in science research in HS? Here’s my take on this:
Research is treated like another EC. Put another way, participating in research for 10+ hours throughout high school a week can be considered equivalent to participating in a sport throughout high school. It looks good on a college application.
Just like extraordinary performance in sports can help with college admissions, extraordinary performance in research can also help in college admissions. The people at the very top in terms of STEM accomplishments have admit rates similar to that of recruited athletes.
There is probably some intermediate level of accomplishment between the two that helps with admissions, but I don’t have a good handle on what that is. Perhaps it is winning the state level of the science fair.
