<p>I don’t mean to be crass, but realize that college professors get paid to mentor. For example, most organized undergraduate research internship programs are taken for credit. That is, the students pay the University for the experience of working on a research project. As a HS student asking to work in a research lab, you may be viewed as asking for something for free that other people in the lab are paying for. While I would love to be in a position to give away my time for free, I can’t. And, there are many organized internship programs in which I can get credit for the mentoring of students.</p>
<p>visit scholar holler.com (remove the spaces when typing it in the address bar) and i’m sure u’ll see a “how-to” write an email when contacting a professor.</p>
<p>Though, I do suggest reading or getting some overlook of the professor’s work before emailing them, as I did.</p>
<p>So, all this talk about the supervision and training of high school students, does this apply to high schoolers doing non-science things? Like I was interested in Political Science, I was thinking Poli Sci professors don’t get as much requests for research and it would be a little bit easier for them to accommodate high school students since there is no training and stuff like that. Is my intuition correct or not?</p>
<p>i like dab3’s answer. my kids have had success contacting graduate students and have learned a lot also…they had well thought out projects with a timeline and asked for limited help…</p>
<p>“So, all this talk about the supervision and training of high school students, does this apply to high schoolers doing non-science things? Like I was interested in Political Science, I was thinking Poli Sci professors don’t get as much requests for research and it would be a little bit easier for them to accommodate high school students since there is no training and stuff like that. Is my intuition correct or not?”</p>
<p>In these economic times in which courseloads are being increased and other cuts are being made that cause profs to have to do more work during less time and possibly for less money, it may be difficult for a high school student to get any professor to agree to more than a brief appointment.</p>
<p>If you want to do political science research, why would you need a professor’s help anyway? Most of the work that you’d be doing would be something that you’d do on your own either through, for instance, conducting oral histories or doing archival research. </p>
<p>It’s highly unlikely that a political science professor would need or welcome your help on their own research because you’d lack the training to help. The prof would more than likely use a graduate student who could be doing the research as part of a course or their thesis or dissertation.</p>
<p>By the way, even when graduate students in, for instance, the social sciences do their thesis or dissertation research, they don’t meet with their professors that much. When I did my dissertation, I think I had a total of 5 individual meetings with my professor over the 2 years that it took me to do my research. I had one group meeting to defend my proposal and another to defend my dissertation. After defending my dissertation, I had a brief meeting with my professor to have him see that I’d made the changes the committee had suggested. </p>
<p>If there’s something specific that you’d like to research and you’ve put some time and effort into finding out general info about the area, and you have some ideas about how you’d like to proceed, if a professor is familiar with that subject, s/he may be willing to meet with you to give you some tips about how best to do your research. However, it’s doubtful that a professor would want to be bothered with a student who is simply hoping the professor will give them a subject to research, and also will hold their hand by meeting with the student hours each week to help the student do the research.</p>
<p>Every professor I have talked to in my life time has said anyone who is not atleast a highly qualified undergrad or graduate student in X major is pretty much useless to his/her work.</p>
<p>There are very few students who have the wherwithall to perform the kind of research the professors/grad students are doing without, like has been said before, training students and spending inordinate amounts of time dealing with them. </p>
<p>If you truly are gifted (I know of several people like this) and maybe submit your work to a local/national science fair or Intel or something you may stand a shot, but really just work hard in your studies and don’t take things too quickly.</p>
<p>Wow, this is a bit of a rude awakening. I thought there might be a slight possiblity a professor would take me on if I offered to work for free/ help out, but I guess not. </p>
<p>If it’s really as unlikely as everyone is saying on this thread, than how did some CCers get research with a professor? It seems almost common on this site. </p>
<p>btw, do community college professors do research?</p>
<p>The CC members who get to do research with professors often are able to because the profs are family friends. That’s the same way that lots of CC members get so-called internships even though they are high school students with no employment experience.</p>
<p>Community college professors are less likely to do research than are 4-year college professors because community colleges are designed to be teaching institutions not research institutions. Community college professors and instructors also tend to have much heavier courseloads than do university professors, so have even less time available to do research and to mentor students whom they aren’t officially teaching. </p>
<p>If you want to do research, do research on your own. You really don’t need a professor to hold your hand through the process. Lots of research requires one to spend a lot of time reading professional journals (which you can read in your local library, on-line or in your local college libraries) and doing original research such as surveying people or conducting oral histories.</p>
<p>You can do things like this, too, as part of history fairs and science fairs and by doing extra work on papers assigned for your high school classes. More than likely, your high school teachers would be happy to help guide you in such research.</p>
<p>You also could do research as part of school clubs – if you’re motivated and organized enough to do this.</p>
<p>Any student who has a strong interest in doing research can find a way to do this on their own. Of course, if the student simply is looking for decoration for their resume, that’s a different story…</p>
<p>And if you really do want to have a professor to supervise your research, Google to find the summer programs that provide such opportunities – for a fee, but that would be worth it if you’re really interested in doing research. NIH and NASA I believe still even have programs that pay talented high school students to do research under the supervision of scientists. High grades, scores and, I think, evidence of a strong interest in research is required. Google for info.</p>
<p>^[1](<a href=“http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Education/Students/Research/sharp.html]Dryden”>http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Education/Students/Research/sharp.html) </p>
<p>the deadline is…2004 :(</p>
Dryden</a> Education - Summer High School Apprenticeship Research Program (SHARP) ↩︎
<p>you should try and see if there are any students that you know that already have an internship with a professor and see if they’ll give you a good rec. for them.</p>
<p>Last year my friend did an internship at UM’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute and she told me that I should contact her mentor because he’s interested in taking on high school intern, he works with HHMI. So just see what others are doing and see if they’ll put in a good word for you or if they have connections somewhere.</p>
<p>I don’t know if this makes sense… :)</p>
<p>What Sandra suggested makes sense. If any of your friends or classmates’ parents are academics, they also may be able to connect you with a professor.</p>
<p>What if you don’t have too much of a math or science background? Would you then be better off researching something else like Economics?</p>
<p>Science and economics or whatever wouldn’t make much of a difference. What Northstarmom is trying to say is that these professors would choose an undergraduate or a graduate student over a high school student any day of the week.</p>
<p>Thank you, aspasp.</p>
<p>In addition, professors are not interested in wasting their time with a high school student who is basically trying to use them to decorate their resumes. Professors know that any high school student who is sincerely interested in doing research can do so on their own. If such a student – who has already pursued their interests by doing some independent research – approaches a professor whom the student has carefully chosen due to the professor’s specific background and asks that professor for a brief meeting to provide some guidance, the professor probably will agree.</p>
<p>However with the exception of professors who are family friends, professors in any discipline have absolutely no interest in wasting their precious time by agreeing to mentor a student in a “research internship” who hasn’t bothered to do any research on their own.</p>
<p>If you want a research internship to decorate your resume then Google and find one of the many such opportunities that you can obtain by paying for one. Unfortunately, most had applications due weeks earlier, but there are plenty of other summer programs that are still taking applications, and you probably can land one of those and thus have a guaranteed way of having something to include on apps to underscore your “passions”.</p>
<p>Just realize that when it comes to the very top colleges, the admissions officers and alum interviewers are savvy enough to be far more impressed by things like ordinary jobs that students landed for themselves and research paper assignments in which students went way beyond what the teacher asked for than pricey summer “research internship” programs or so-called internships that unskilled, inexperienced students got with doting relatives and family friends.</p>
<p>"i was in a chance thread, and i happened to see how a kid was told that he should “get a research position with an ivy professor and you’re in.”</p>
<p>That’s an exaggeration, though certainly students who’ve gotten such positions would stand out in an Ivy pool. What’s important to realize, however, is that to get a research position with an Ivy professor, a high school student would need to have had an exceptional background in research – research that they probably did on their own, and did in great depth. </p>
<p>No professor at a top university is going to waste their time holding the hand of a random student who has no research background, but is hoping the professor will spend lots of time with them so the student can dress up their college app so as to be accepted to HPYS.</p>