<p>Disclaimer: I applied EA and was deferred, so am considering whether/what additional materials to send in the coming weeks. So that's something to keep in mind when answering for me specifically, although I think the general question will be useful to others as well.</p>
<p>Anyway, I was wondering what would be considered "advanced scientific research" suitable for submission to Yale as a supplement to my application. Although I have had two separate internships in neurobiology labs over the last two summers, no research papers came out of those (although I was acknowledged for my work in a journal article by the first lab). However, for my IB Extended Essay, I did some pretty involved independent research about the effect of urbanization on wild bee populations (I did not collect the data myself and instead got it from a USGS biologist, but the processing, analysis, etc. was done by me, with some mentoring by the same biologist). It's not on the level of a professional paper, but my biologist mentor said it was very well written and had only minimal comments to make when he read my earlier draft. Would this be something that would be appropriate and would possibly help / at least not hurt to send to Yale? If so, would an abstract be better than the full paper (full paper is 25 pages double-spaced including appendices)?</p>
<p>The idea I have somewhat seriously considered so far is including the abstract and talking about the research in the update letter I plan on sending to Yale in January. However, Yale does already know the title of this paper (my IB Extended Essay) and the fact that I have written it (because those two pieces of information were included in a letter from my school's IB office), plus it was kind of a school-required assignment (at least if I wanted to stay in the IB program, haha) - so would that make my idea a bad one?</p>
<p>You should send the full paper. Yale likes science research and prefers full papers to abstracts. I sent in my paper last year and you can see what happened. Something that will be somewhat problematic is the fact that you did not gather the data yourself, although if you got the biologist to write a rec mentioning all the work you did AND sent the paper then I think that would be a very strong complement to your application.</p>
<p>yeah dbate, your anecdote may be telling but maybe not. when i applied to yale, i only sent my abstract in. i also only sent my abstract to princeton, harvard, and stanford and was accepted to those as well. so honestly i think that whether or not you send your abstract or whole paper is not going to make or break your application. </p>
<p>that said, if yale wants the whole paper, then by all means, send in the whole paper…ONLY IF you think it’s really, really, really good. remember the faculty members that will be reading your papers have been published several times in the top scientific journals in the world. so they know the difference between world-class research and…a high school project. </p>
<p>That is also true. In my case I did all the research entirely on my own and had some awards for it but nothing really major like Intel or Seimen’s so I sent my whole paper in to show that it was advanced research. So I guess it really just depends.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone. I did ask my mentor for his honest opinion of the quality of the paper and he wrote back that it is of “publication grade” and that he recommends sending it along, the data set itself being the only potential problem. But I think I will send the full paper to Yale, hopefully it at least won’t hurt.</p>