<p>How do you conduct such complicated experiments??? Did it require reading college-level textbooks?</p>
<p>this competition is a bit biased. it is like me standing in front of the great wall and told to climb it.. while the kids of PhD professors have full access to laboratories.</p>
<p>blah,</p>
<p>You work in a lab with a professor. Either participate in a summer program or find a lab on your own (by e-mailing professors working in your ares of interest). Generally for Westinghouse, the students who do well are those who have made some sort of significant discovery (ie. discovering a new galaxy or a potential cure for diabetes), so you have to get lucky. If you're looking to do original research (rather than just working with a prof on his/her research), I think the best way to do it is to work with a prof for a while in an area of your interest and then come up with questions/experiments/inventions that are an extension upon his/her research and discuss them with him/her to make sure they haven't already been dome by someone else. I think most high schoolers just don't have enough experience in scientific research to come up with their own questions that haven't already been answered by someone somewhere.</p>
<p>i totally agree with t3hcan0n: if you've ever looked at the biographies of the students who won the competitions, you will see that they have AT LEAST one parent who owns a lab or is a doctor or something like that...geez, that leaves other kids, like me, who have almost no resources, to somehow find a way to do this research. not fun, when you live an hour away from the nearest research lab...hey, life is unfair :(</p>
<p>I went to ISEF last year and am submitting a project to the Westinghouse and STS and I have no "scientist" parents. I was awarded an internship at a federal nuclear research facility and did my work there.</p>
<p>you guys are killing my confidence in my project, haha</p>
<p>has the semifinalist results always come out 10/21 at 5 PM? or could it possibly come out earlier like SATs sometimes do</p>
<p>Don't worry. I came up with an original idea in Artificial Intelligence(my results weren't too conclusive, by I think the approach is very good). </p>
<p>Also, on the mentor form, there is a place where they ask what kinds of facilities, mentors, etc you used and had access to. </p>
<p>I did summer research, but that is something different from Siemens project.</p>
<p>We'll see how it goes.</p>
<p>i still havent finished my paper! ahhh! I plan on overnighting it tomorrow :o</p>
<p>That's so me, Rikataka! I didn't get my final results in the lab until Saturday afternoon, so it's been a little crazy...running back and forth to meet with my mentor, e-mailing him, staying up until 3 in the morning (only to take an exam at school at 7:45 having studied only half an hour for it). I've enjoyed every moment of my project, but I'll be happy to finally get more than 4 hours of sleep a night!</p>
<p>So I take it you guys are doing STS as well?</p>
<p>Question: What are you saying in your introduction about how your research topic was chosen? Are you incorporating it elsewhere, or what?</p>
<p>are there more individual projects than team projects?</p>
<p>I discussed how I derived my ideas from bio class, and my 9th grade personal project, building a full chess engine.</p>
<p>There are definetly more team projects than individual.</p>
<p>I stayed up till 3:30 AM last night before everything was packed and ready to go.</p>
<p>So I take it we can write that part in singular first person? ("I chose to do this because...") How personal can it be? (like mentioning a friend who has the disease we're studying, as long as it's brief and not sappy?)</p>
<p>Hmmmm... I used we throughout the project(team project), like</p>
<p>We derived the following complexity analysis of the situation analysis network:</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>etc.</p>
<p>Mine was pretty short(why I chose to do project).</p>
<p>well, I went to PROMYS over the summer and did minimal research.
When I got home, I did research on something related but pretty different...but math is pretty easy to do at home...
I pulled an all-nighter last night, but I think I finally figured out LaTex :)</p>
<p>Question: Is it OK if i didn't directly answer the question regarding the origin of my research project. I think my mentor must have addressed it in her Mentor/Advisor form considering that's what Question 1 is about. Are judges going to be looking at just the research paper, or the research paper and the mentor advisor form?</p>
<p>oh sweet.. so when they say 1000 total projects.. you guys think there are more than 500 group projects.. that would rock for me (individual).. but im in a hard region i hear.</p>
<p>social_pariah,</p>
<p>As long as you have an introduction, I'm sure you have sufficiently answered the origin of the research project (i.e. you have defined a problem or question and seek to solve it). Don't worry about it too much.</p>
<p>stop helping each other.. it is a competition after all!</p>
<p>I heard that team is easier to get to semifinalist, since not as many teams enter. But that's just what I heard, anybody can confirm this?</p>