Hey guys!
I was interested in applying for the 6-week high school research program at UT Austin. (https://cns.utexas.edu/tides/k-12/high-school-summer-research-academy)
I was wondering if anyone here has attended it and what their experience was? Do you actually get any research done? (I wanted to do something in the Biomed field)
Also, does anyone know how competitive this program is? (In terms of how many people apply, how many get in and how much universities value this program)
Thanks!
Hey! I attended HSRA last year as a sophomore. It was really cool to work in a university lab, but the experience wasn’t all that I hoped for. First of all, the only lab placements are in the Freshman Research Initiative Streams, which don’t perform as high-level research as actual labs. I worked in the Gene Mapping Stream with around eight other high school students and many college students.
The lab hours were from 10-5. Sometimes our mentor arrived late though. It was a really relaxed environment. A lot of time was spent waiting around for tests to run. Not the most exciting. You can have a lunch break whenever you’re waiting (many cool restaurants on campus). The program requires at least 5 weeks of work, but the timing is really up to you. Our lab mentor didn’t care if we were gone a few days. One girl even went to Europe for two weeks. I ended up staying around 7 weeks. You can pretty much stay however long the lab is open.
We were each assigned independent projects at the beginning, so I thought that was really exciting. However, after almost two months of research, I produced no conclusive results. Neither did any of the other HS students. Many tests (PCR especially) failed over and over again, forcing us to repeat tedious processes. That’s the problem with this program. They don’t expect too much out of you. There is no research paper, formal presentation, or anything. It’s really fun to hang out with other high school students and gain research experience, but don’t expect any meaningful findings to come out of it. It may be different in other streams though.
I’m not sure how hard it is to get in. All of the high schoolers were top-of-the-class students and were really passionate about science. One of my friends from the lab was accepted into Yale this year, but I’m not sure if HSRA really helped her application that much. Anyway, I’m applying again this year, but will probably choose a different program over HSRA.