<p>How many of you do research? Is it possible for a high school student to do research without a mentor? If you do have a mentor, how much of the work is your own? Are you stuck cleaning test tubes or counting fruit flies?</p>
<p>I'm interested in physics/math/engineering, but I don't have much background in any of them. Any suggestions?</p>
<p>Uh I would like to do research but I cant find a mentor...
I guess you can send your "resume" out to local universities and ask for a professor to try and mentor you...
Also, I guess you can do reasearch to participate in prestigious competitions like Siemens or Intel.
Umm I want to do math/physics but I also dont have any real background in math research aside from math competitions but I dont think you really need that deep of a math background to do reasearch in math do you?</p>
<p>I do research at a local university (UCLA). They give me a project (something actually important), and I do it :)</p>
<p>I also do some research on my own, but that's more for ISEF...</p>
<p>I did some research back in high school that basically consisted of doing theory, computer simulations, etc. for an experimental fruit fly lab. Basically the prof would just ask me how long things would take and I'd write some programs and spit back a number. They didn't require much background to write, I hadn't had any biology background past AP, but it was nice to have AP Statistics beforehand. (Statistics is actually important, take it.)</p>
<p>I got a Science paper out of it, so that was nice. And I became a much better programmer :) All in all it was a really good experience.</p>
<p>I'd strongly recommend getting a mentor because then you'll have a sense of the shape of the discipline and you'll know what problems to solve. Otherwise you'd have to do a lot of literature-searching on your own and you might end up working on a problem people think is impossible or solving a problem that's already been solved. Mentors are not hard to find, especially if you're interested in biology or chemistry. You're free (cheap?) labor. Experimentalists always need more hands around the lab.</p>