NYTimes: Intel Competition - Where Science Rules

Parents Forum
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<p>NYTimes on the Intel Competition: For the third year in a row, both the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School in New York City have been shut out of the circle of 40 finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search.</p>

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More high schools around the country are teaching students how to do cutting-edge research, not just imparting textbook science...</p>

<p>The Intel is more than a gimmicky contest that garners publicity for its chipmaker sponsor. It genuinely prompts hundreds of students to plunge into vanguard research. This year, 1,705 students from 487 schools in 44 states entered, said Katherine Silkin, the contest?s program manager. High school seniors in the United States and its territories enter the Intel, though their research often begins years earlier...</p>

<p>The contest, which began in 1941, has been monopolized by New York schools because it had its roots in a local science fair and a cluster of New York personalities. Bronx Science and Stuyvesant eventually figured out the magical formula: Teach your kids to do research; don?t just offer cookbook experiments. Pair them with mentors at hospitals and universities, perhaps working on a small piece of the mentor?s puzzle, so the projects are more than garage-built contraptions. Assign high school teachers as enforcers to help students through rough patches and make sure they meet deadlines...</p>

<p>e-mail and the Internet have reduced the need to travel. And more institutions like the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where Miriam Rafailovich, a professor of material science, has supervised many winners on Long Island, have made themselves available to nearby schools.</p>

<p>In addition, many rural and Southern states have started high school research programs, often building dormitories to attract distant students, as part of efforts to jump-start themselves as incubators of technological innovation. Stanley Teitel, Stuyvesant?s principal, said that he thinks Intel judges are increasingly recognizing this wider spectrum.</p>

<p>?They are not going to allow me to monopolize this competition,? he said, ?and I think that?s wonderful.?

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<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/nyregion/07education.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/nyregion/07education.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>There are a lot of bright people in stuy, but only some of them are willing to do research. It's really a huge commitment when you consider that the average stuy student is very overworked and doesn't get much sleep. I almost didn't do a research project for that reason even though I thought it would be a cool experience. So I signed up for the class that requires you to enter Intel in order to pass, because I wanted to make it a priority for myself and somehow fit it into the vast amounts of other work that I had.</p>

<p>Well, fast forward about a year -- I made Intel Semifinalist and got into MIT. </p>

<p>Yet there are students much brighter than me that didn't enter Intel. It's true that initiative is very important and that some people are not into research. But I wonder if the pressure in Stuy to get the highest average possible along with the feeling of "There's no way I could make semifinalist" makes the commitment of Intel research unattractive to many talented students.</p>

<p>Compare this situation to an extremely bright and motivated student who is not challenged in their average high school and is hungry to go and do research.</p>

<p>I don't doubt that if the best math/science students were required to do research (even starting as late as second term junior year, which is when most people in stuy start) stuy could double or triple its semifinalists and even have a number of finalists. I'm not advocating this per se, but I think some schools do that.</p>

<p>I see a lot of talent go to waste just over concerns regarding the commitment to research and the potential drop in gpa. I get the feeling that a lot of kids in these types of schools almost came up with a new method of machine vision, or almost found some new method of a particular cancer treatment, etc, but thought the cost in doing research outweighed the benefit.</p>

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<p>When I was in college more than 30 years ago, I got to know about a half-dozen kids who had gone to Bronx Science.</p>

<p>Most of them had no interest whatsoever in science.</p>

<p>They had gone to Bronx Science not because they cared about science, but because they wanted to avoid going to inferior neighborhood high schools and/or because they were very academic and wanted to be with other students who were very academic (or their parents wanted these things). Bronx Science was the only option available to them (this was before Stuyvesant went co-ed, and these students were girls). If there had been an elite academic school available to them that was not specifically focused on science, they would have enrolled in it rather than going to Bronx Science. But they didn't have that option.</p>

<p>Are things still this way in NYC? Do kids still go to Bronx Science (or Stuyvesant) not because they love science but because these science schools are the only elite academic programs available to them?</p>

<p>If that's the way it is, it could account for some of the lack of interest in Intel.</p>

<p>I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. We have a math/science magnet program here, but it isn't the only elite academic program available to our students. There's also a selective IB program that attracts the non-science-oriented academic kids, and quite a few of our neighborhood high schools are good enough that an academic-type kid can have a good four years there, without having to enroll in any kind of magnet. Our kids have non-science choices. Thus, those in the science program tend to be those who actually like science. </p>

<p>Our school system had 15 Intel semifinalists this year, 12 of whom were in the science magnet.</p>

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<p>Marian,
My husband went to Bx Sci in that same time frame. He was a math/science and debate guy, and Bx Sci at that time was the best way for the bright kids of working-class families to get onto the college ladder.</p>

<p>He did <em>not</em> do Intel (then Westinghouse, and told me that some of his teachers were disappointed that he didn't. There was a culture of doing research then, but he says it was much tougher to get mentors, etc. He wound up at a NSF program in the South to do his research the summer between junior and senior years.</p>

<p>Blair starts with the kids in 9th grade to learn how to do lab/engineering work, and by junior year, they take a research design and senior project sequence. By then, they have learned to keep excellent journals, write resumes to seek out mentorships, etc. That institutional supprt really helps; we know someone who spent a summer doing research at NIH, but didn't have enough time to write up his work for Intel because of EE deadlines, etc.</p>

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<p>I think stuy (and i assume bx sci is similar), while known as a math/science school, is great in all departments - in fact some would argue that the teaching quality of the english dept is better than, say, physics, but with a comparable level of courses. I know a lot of people in stuy that say math is not their thing at all but there are plenty of other things in terms of courses and activities that are humanities related. </p>

<p>On the other hand, if you know you're a humanities person, then Townsend Harris might probably be a better choice from what I've heard. I think Stuy is a bit like MIT -- its a math/science magnet but it has other great programs as well as people with diverse academic interests</p>

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<p>Follow-up article from the NY Times, the winner is 17-year-old Mary Masterman: </p>

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A senior at Westmoore High School in Oklahoma City, Mary built the spectrograph at home for $300, and her project won the top prize of a $100,000 scholarship in the Intel Science Talent Search Monday night in Washington.</p>

<p>?The most challenging part was trying to get it to work,? said Mary, who said she hoped to attend Stanford or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.</p>

<p>?I had to keep coming up with creative ways to adjust or change something,? she said. ?It took three months to build and another three months before it actually functioned properly.? ...</p>

<p>Some 1,700 students entered this year?s contest, and 40 finalists were chosen, all of whom won a laptop computer and a cash prize. The finalists were almost equally divided by sex. Six women were among the top 10.</p>

<p>The second-place winner was John Pardon, 17, of Chapel Hill, N.C., who researched the unfolding of simple closed curves. He won a $75,000 scholarship.</p>

<p>Dmitry Vaintrob, 18, from South Eugene High School in Eugene, Ore., won the third-place prize, a $50,000 scholarship, for a mathematics project exploring loop homology. ...</p>

<p>New York produced 12 finalists, more than any other state.</p>

<p>Two New Yorkers placed in the top 10.

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<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/science/14science.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/science/14science.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Mary Masterman was ABC news' person of the week last night.</p>

<p><a href="http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2958588&page=1%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2958588&page=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>What really impressed me is that this is a "garage" kind of project rather than one done in a fancy university lab under the mentorship of a professor.</p>