<p>I have been hearing a lot of people say that they did/are doing research, or research assistance, at a local university. I would love to do this; I am particularly interested in machine translation. However, I don't have a very solid background in math (yet; I'm only a sophomore). Also, I have been doing a lot of research on machine translation and related stuff but I don't know how far I will be able to get into the subject without actually taking classes and such. So my question is this -- how much in-depth knowledge will I have to have? Will I just need to be interested in it/Will I be able to learn about it as I go?</p>
<p>Thanks in advance ^^</p>
<p>What kind of translation are you talking about? Verbal, text, language? There are specialized CS courses with a fair amount in prerequisites for those areas. If you aren’t familiar with the math involved, then any kind of position would probably be more of a support role.</p>
<p>What you could do is go to the CS website of local universities and look through the research pages of faculty to see if any of them are doing research in this area - then contact them to see if they have any internship opportunities for high-school students interested in the area.</p>
<p>It might be easier if you broadened what you are interested in doing to something requiring lower skill levels or looked through the research being done at your local university to see what you might be interested in doing.</p>
<p>I was actually a prospective math major before I had,a research type thing in computer science at UCSD (summer after junior year) now im a prospective computer science major…you may find that you end up doing something similar but not exactly the same as your major and LOVE it!</p>