<p>Hello everyone, I think I'm going to apply to Duke and I saw their application and they ask</p>
<p>"If you have participated in any significant research activity outside of school, please provide a brief description and limit your response to one or two paragraphs"</p>
<p>I had an internship in a European Government for part of the summer, does this count as research? I was going to write about this for my personal Common App essay, but should this be a research essay? Can I just combine the two?</p>
<p>I answered some phones but I also frequently went to meetings and took notes and even participated in a few and looked up info prepping me, the politician, and some party members for upcoming meetings and following through on looking up how things that were planned in the meetings were going.</p>
<p>A popular response there would probably be scientific research. For example, this summer I am working in a lab among PhDs and grad students. I am following along with their project/goals/experiments, etc and am being mentored by someone. It’s somewhat like an internship in that I’m there to learn more so than actually advance the project; my job consists mainly of performing some simpler, time-consuming lab procedures (e.g. genotyping) and helping my mentor with bits and pieces of her role within the project.</p>
<p>I’m not sure exactly what would qualify as research for non-scientific subject areas though.</p>
<p>thanks. I know that science experiments and all are research but when I started visitng colleges they talk about all of the research that students do on Wall St and other non-science areas, so that kind of confused me.</p>
<p>As meaningful as your experience was–and there’s certainly an opportunity for you to address it in other sections of your application–it’s not really research in the manner that Duke means. Duke’s looking for scholarly research. </p>
<p>As for non-natural-science research: When I completed my application for Duke last year, I included information about historical research I completed at a local university. My job was to carefully locate and analyze primary and secondary sources on the university’s history and report my findings in specific areas. This information/analyzes was/were used for various university projects… I had to read many books back-to-front just so I had the necessary breadth before even starting any real work, and frankly I thought it a bit of a stretch to call what I did “research.”</p>