<p>lol when you kids get to college you'll see how trivial/nepotistic this competition is.</p>
<p>Not if the student has a $100,000 scholarship</p>
<p>lol yea. and the fact that finalist status helps you get into the college in the first place.</p>
<p>Yeah you get finalist/win the scholarship...and then what? Walk up to a PI your freshman year and say "well blah blah I won this amount of money blah blah that may not have been research I even did blah blah accept me in your lab first semester blah"?</p>
<p>Doesn't work that way. I'm watching kids who barely did research, let alone enter said competitions, in HS speed past all the STS/Siemens winners.</p>
<p>Oh I agree with you on that point. Clearly having won these awards does not guarantee future success. Hard work and passion do. But having $100,000 of scholarhsip money to help you with college costs is in no way trivial.<br>
Also, it is many of these "PIs" at college labs who promulgate the charade of the ISEF/STS winners. If the mentors know it was their conception and the student merely performed drudge work, why are they writing recs for them and not stating the facts? Because they like to say their labs produced ISEF and STS winners. The PIs need to be frank in what they tell these competitions. This is not meant as an indictment of all student ISEF/STS winners by any means. Many do perform all of the work and come to the lab with the idea. Or there are those that work solo without a mentor and outside a lab. Hopefully, when they present as finalists, the ones who have truly done the work and conceived of the idea will be rewarded.</p>
<p>What is a PI? I can't find it on urban dictionary, or anywhere else. </p>
<p>shalashaska- It is a mistake to assume that all of the semifinalists work in a lab with a mentor. My son did not. He did all of his own work, at home and in the field. He worked very, very hard for a long time.
Even for those kids who did work in a lab with a mentor, it is a mistake to assume that they didn't do their own work or have their own ideas. I have met some of these kids and they are absolutely brilliant. They have the test scores and other awards that back up their ability to succeed as scientists, which is what the Intel STS is about. If you look at what the past years' finalists have accomplished, you'll see that Intel does a pretty good job of picking out those students who will be successful scientists.<br>
If the Intel / Siemens awards were all based on the mentors' ideas and research, I doubt you'd see the former award winners accomplishing so much in later years.</p>
<p>^Principal Investigator - lead researcher on a project</p>
<p>okay, back to my question. Did anyone get that ceremony at their schools?</p>
<p>
<p>Doesn't work that way. I'm watching kids who barely did research, let alone enter said competitions, in HS speed past all the STS/Siemens winners.
</p>
<p>hmm. why not? even if you didn't do that research, you're still somewhat ahead of someone who didn't do any research. i'm assuming that even if someone didn't conceive of the idea that they still know how to use equipment that someone who has never done research before won't know how to use, they should know how to go through, find and read relevant scientific papers, and should know basic data analysis. even if they didn't do "research" they still did SOMETHING in the lab...and they can always learn</p>
<p>@ rocketpower
the Intel Prize Patrol team surprises a few semifinalists at school. A few, certainly not all of them, receive the balloons and check. </p>
<p>btw, I read from an earlier thread that some semifinalists receive a banner for the school that announces there's a Intel semifinalist attending. Can anyone confirm this? or did someone confuse this with the Siemens one?</p>
<p>Okay thanks. One of the nice ladies who took pictures for us actually created a facebook page for semifinalists. Its here The</a> Official Intel Science Talent Search Semifinalists Group 2009 | Facebook And she actually posted the pictures and videos of the three of us (I do look a little too serious in the middle). So that's why I asked about the prize patrol because we seem to be the only school who got our pictures taken. It's been 9 long years since the last semifinalist, and all of a sudden we have 3, so that's probably why they showed up at our school.</p>
<p>Videos</a> from The Official Intel Science Talent Search Semifinalists Group 2009: Semifinalists getting their "big checks" | Facebook
u mean this?</p>
<p>Ya thats us. Lincoln Park High School in Chicago, Illinois</p>
<p>^^ ugh, that's totally not fair. I'm only about half an hour drive from chicago, and they didn't come to my school :(</p>
<p>What school you go to? I'm Lincoln Park.</p>
<p>omg there are a lot of ppl with omg at the beginning of their user.</p>
<p>^^ +1 :D
10words</p>
<p>Ticktock- the banner is from Siemens</p>
<p>^^ thanks. Sadly, my school never hung up my banner :(</p>
<p>@ Rocketpower: Libertyville</p>
<p>The whole Virginia state has 15 semifinalists of Intel STS 2009 and all of them are from TJHSST. Unbelievable, these kids came from Northern Virginia which has about 1.5 million porpulation only.</p>