I am interviewing for a job this week and I was wondering where I would go to read about the various STEM competitions and prizes out there? Is there one place that lists them all? And how will I know which are reputable and which are not?
Thanks
What precisely are you looking for? What type of information. If you competed/won awards, certainly you know about them. Or does the job you’re interviewing for involve you participating in running or selecting students from these competitions?
Googling “International Olympiad” with most STEM terms - math, physics, chemistry, computing, etc., should get you started, and you can trace back to the US and local competitions that feed them.
Also, ISEF, which I think stands for International Science and Engineering Fair, has competitions that start at the local level and go to the international level. Intel runs a highly reputable competition that is project based as well. Siemens ran one until about 2 years ago. These differ from the International Olympiad competitions in that all of them are research project based, rather than test based (including lab tests, but still tests, not projects developed by the students).
I didn’t realize Siemens had ended the competition! What a bummer.
Regeneron now runs the big Science Talent Search competition that used to be known as the Westinghouse and more recently, Intel.
The Olympiads have US-based competitions (USAMO, USABO), etc. Most of these are purely test-based – some are problem-solving and others are testing knowledge. USACO (computer science) has competitions with programming problem sets several times over the year. They have gold, silver and bronze levels, which reflect the difficulty of problems. USACO also has a free online curriculum which offers some very good instruction.
AIME is another big math competition and has a couple of levels. AMC12 and AIME scores are used to calculate the index for USAMO team selection.
My kids were involved in Science Olympiad. Schools put together a team and there are different events some involve making stuff (catapults, Rube Goldberg type devices) others involve taking tests. It was really good for my older son who tends to be anti-social. It’s not as prestigious as some, but it is a serious competition.
There’s also the FIRST Robotics competition.