The real point of any research-related EC is not the prestige, nor acceptance rate. Doing a research internship or being at a “prestigious” research-related summer program is really no different than any other summer activity which demonstrates interest as well as demonstrating that the student does stuff
What may make more of an impression is what is accomplished. A student who produces a an article which is accepted for publication in a good peer-reviewed scientific journal will get a lot of attention, no matter what it is about, or the prestige of the university of the students faculty mentor, while merely attending a prestigious program with a low acceptance rate will likely not.
Not at all, because the prestige of the university really says absolutely nothing about the student.
It’s safe to assume that AOs know that internships such as this are often obtained through family connections. So it’s unlikely that the fact of the internship itself wasn’t any more impressive than an internship with an aerospace engineering professor at a good university.
So to attract serious attention with such an EC a student has to have serious accomplishments.
That being said, most applicants to programs like AE at CMU don’t have serious accomplishments of that sort and aren’t accepted because of great things that they did during an internship.
The internship is not for the college AOs. The internship is for your brother. Your friend didn’t have his family members help him get an internship at NASA because it would help him in college admissions, but because a NASA internship is something that any kid interested in AE would love doing.
I don’t know how old your brother is, but he has only so many summers during high school, and he should use them to do stuff that he is interested in. Whatever he prefers to do is what he should do. Of course, he has to first be accepted to one of these programs, so for now, it’s all theoretical.
He’s in 10th rn, so he’s currently applying to some of the research programs. He’s also applying for some math camps bc he’s really good at math (USAJMO Qual last year), and he’s really into that.
I realize I’m digressing from the HS focus - but to the above point, my daughter’s first two internships (one 3 summer-months, the other full-year) were in the “field”, and while on relevant/visible research projects at respected institutions and involving challenging tasks, they still were typical, repetitive “undergraduate intern” work. They mostly required commitment, persistence, and modestly accepting that someone had to do the “grunt” work.
Then again, isn’t that precisely what the next school (college, grad school), or professor will be looking for in their first-year candidates? They need fewer people having “published” and expecting step “up” from there, and instead more smart people, who have a sufficient background and are willing to put the hours in.
For my daughter, she fostered good relations with her research coordinators, which resulted it good letters of recommendation for her grad school applications, in addition to having repeatedly proven long-term commitment to “applicable” research tasks.
Although I would argue that the process of publishing can be an educational one - for many fields, it includes IRB approval process and the understanding of research ethics and human subjects protocols, as well as the peer review process which generally demonstrates to a student how to evaluate the information they read in the future - what is reliable and why it is reliable. So I think publishing can be a good experience, not for the “prestige” of it, but for what can be learned from it.
Absolutely.
I know of a (now PhD) who was not well-mentored in that regard. Spent years running lab experiments in a very “sexy”, fully funded field - but was never mentored to make sure he was also publishing along the way because that was the measure by which the job market was assessing all the fresh PhDs.
So, I’m not discouraging publishing. But it ought to be for the reasons you stated, not in hopes that it might look better as a résumé item at HS level, vs. an (unpublished) long-term research commitment.
Issues like publishing in academia are some of my favorite topics. However, that is a huge digression and of no help to anybody who is interested in the topic of the. So let us please get back to the topic of the thread, before I too get drawn in, and I promise you all, NOBODY wants that to happen…