<p>Lolz, you came here. :p</p>
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2) Do grad schools care about papers you did in high school, or is it like in college admissions where middle school stuff doesn't matter?
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<p>If you didn't follow along with your papers, then they'd question your actions in between. So it doesn't really matter aside from how it jumpstarted your college research.</p>
<p>That being said though, it could be a hook on the personal statement</p>
<p>1) Any. Yes.
2) You wrote scientific papers in high school...?</p>
<p>1) The quality is generally more important than quantity.
2) Most of your HS accomplishments are irrelevant. Notable exception includes published conference/journal paper(s) ...</p>
<p>How do you define "quality?" Do you have to be first author for a paper to be of "good quality," or is the prestige of the journal the only thing that matters?</p>
<p>Basically, what's "higher quality," a fourth-author paper in Nature, or a first-author paper in a lesser journal?</p>
<p>Being any author of a Nature paper is a big deal when you are a prof, so don't count on being on that level as an undergrad.</p>
<p>Quality is relative. A publication on "Nature" by itself will raise an eyebrow. It is absolutely better when considering you have spent 3 years on that project in a prominent lab, and the fact your well-known PI is writing you a great LOR. As far as I know, that kind of experience will put you on must-interview list on most schools (assuming your PI will even let you apply there :)). Contrast that to you spent a semester doing enough research works for a professor that led to a first-author publication (albeit on some lesser known conference). Make sense?</p>
<p>So how good a paper is for grad school depends mostly on the letter of recommendation and the amount of time you spent on the project?</p>
<p>addwit, I am not the same person that posted the original comment about paper in high school, but I am currently a high school senior, and a paper I worked on at NASA last summer was invited to Inter-Noise (an annual international conference on acoustics), I will also be doing another internship via the LaRSS program this summer with some potential at publications (though technically that would be as a rising college freshman). So yeah, would grad schools consider that research experience? I highly doubt I would end up in aeroacoustics for grad school, but either way?</p>
<p>Geeze, high school kids are doing research these days?? With the rate you're going, you'll have enough great research under your belt that you won't even need to discuss the rising-freshman work you've done. </p>
<p>I feel I should point out that getting publications is not vital as an undergrad to get into a top school. I have exactly zero of them and did just fine in admissions. Also, I didn't begin any research until my sophomore year of college.</p>
<p>fizix. Good thinking. A publication is just another acomplishment. Personal statement and LORs are what tells the story - specifically what/how/why did you actually do. Generally, the longer time you work with a professor, the more your professor knows your works and you as a person.</p>
<p>You can still get into top programs w/o a publication (as long as you have some meaningful research experience). But having one under the belt does separate you from the pack. </p>
<p>BTW, how a paper depends on its content not the time its author(s) spends on it. ;)</p>
<p>Thanks! Another question:</p>
<p>If you want a PhD in math, will it help at all if you have a paper in, say, biology?</p>
<p>hmm... are you trying to pioneer a new field, bio-math? :)</p>
<p>Sorry to deliver the bad news, but it's already been pioneered.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_biology%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_biology</a></p>
<p>I would think it would have a non-negative effect. I don't know how big, unless you were going into an applied Math Bio program</p>
<p>I think the point he is trying to make is this:</p>
<p>very few undergrads know exactly what they want to specialize in in grad school their freshman year, but many know they want to go on to get a PhD in a general field. So, what if a person begins doing research late freshman or sophomore or maybe even junior year that they eventually find isn't what they want to do. Perhaps a physics major works in a nanotech lab for a year before deciding they want to do string theory, yet manages to publish a nanotech paper. Does this seemingly irrelevant research experience have significant impact on your grad school app, or will they pass it by?</p>
<p>Sometimes I get the feeling that the only people that can make it to the top few grad schools and get the good positions in academia/RI's in some fields are the ones that get to undergrad knowing exactly what they want to specialize in.</p>
<p><em>my 2 cents</em> I have a feeling there is some merit to doing research in unrelated fields. I did some heavy aeroacoustics research last summer at NASA, but do I want to specialize in acoustics? Heck no! Its a dying field, but having that real lab/research experience in high school killed a lot of my fears as to whether or not I want to make a career of research. Sure, I may want the heck out of college 4 years from now, but have some experience that tells me I would love to go on to get a PhD. I guess the bio/math idea may be a bit different since bio research is more likely to be sitting in a lab playing with petri dishes and math is more likely to be sitting in a desk and pulling your hair out, so unless you want to go into bioinformatics, it may be a different situation, but still... it was a hypothetical question</p>
<p>Oops.. I guess I should not be surprised about bio-math. The way things are going, we will have bio- (or nano-) on just about everything. ;)</p>
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Sometimes I get the feeling that the only people that can make it to the top few grad schools and get the good positions in academia/RI's in some fields are the ones that get to undergrad knowing exactly what they want to specialize in.
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Those who have developed an specific interest/focus early tend to already advance much further than those who are still "searching". </p>
<p>Aside from gaining in-depth understanding of a field, undergrade research also helps one to develop some key research skills. Because many fields share similar problem-solving approaches, it's very common for people to go from one subfield to another seemingly unrelated one. And, breakthrough results often come from someone trying a "new" approach uncommon in a field. </p>
<p>So, in application process, you have to sell your "transferable" skills. Say you've mastered common approaches used in the field of aeroacoustics (what's that??!!), and in senior year, you discover a passion for biomath. To jump ahead of those who spend four years (if not their entire life) studying bio and math, your application has to convince the adcom that 1) you have enough background (related undergrad courses); 2) you are really into biomath now; and 3) you can re-apply your aeroacoustics experience to related biomath problems that the department is interested. Done all three, you will make as great as a candidate as everybody else. </p>
<p>Depends on the slots available, top programs do take in quite a few "raw" talents, i.e. candidates that seem very bright and have a ton of potential but yet develop an interest.</p>
<p>haha, aeroacoustics is the study of the noise and things relating to the noise created by aircraft. So main research topics are about pinpointing the location of noise generating sources, finding ways to make them quieter, finding accurate/cost effective ways to measure this noise, studying air fluctuations that result from planes flying through the sky, etc. There is a lot of crossover between aeroacoustics and signal processing, so there is research into microphones, pre-amps, data reduction algorithms, etc. and believe me, I only grasped a small aspect of the field in my 8 weeks in the program!</p>
<p>I'll be doing more research this summer with the LaRSS program, but it will be more biomedical based (sort of). My project this summer will deal with <em>and I am totally serious</em> creating a golf putting practice system that responds to physiological data by changing the hole size and surface undulation in response to the data. Don't ask me why NASA is funding it, but it sounds sweet. Anyways, the point I make with that is that I will probably not go into BME, but I should gain some valuable experiences from the program. (hopefully I will at least figure out what I want to major in sometime in the next couple of months, but everything is just so darn interesting!)</p>
<p>haha, so it looks like going into college I will have aeroacoustics research and BME/microcontroller research, the latter will be helpful if I go into EE or robotics, but niether will be of any assistance if i want to specialize in metamaterials or heaven forbid nanobioquantumgenomath.</p>
<p>actually, I take that back, nanobioquantumgenomath may be pretty interesting...</p>
<p><a href="http://diversity.caltech.edu/dpg_reports/irvine06-04/Data.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://diversity.caltech.edu/dpg_reports/irvine06-04/Data.pdf</a> (thanks to NYCFan for statistics)</p>
<p>Graduate admissions at Caltech: 554/3880 => 14.38%.</p>
<p>Isn't very bad compared with its undergrad rate (~17%).</p>
<p>I think that we can effectively say that the state university grad programs have much lower admit rates than undergrads (since many of them compare with Ivy in terms of grad programs). But does the Caltech graduate admissions rate (compared with undergrad) hold for the other top institutions?</p>
<p>And are the applicants to the state universities just as good as those at top institutions? It would depend on the state university, of course. But would Michigan, Berkeley, et al have applicants that are just on par with elite applicants? Then what of lower-tier state universities?</p>
<p>Applied mathematics (esp. nonlinear dynamics) and statistics will be the future of many fields, especially the social science fields. Herbert Gintis says that game theory will be that of the social sciences.</p>
<p>==
Holy **** ehiunno, your field looks totally awesome. Any pop science (Sciam level) sources on your research?</p>
<p>Thanks for sharing the ppt slides but we don't know if the specific admission rate is for PhD and/or masters. </p>
<p>I am a bit shocked (and concerned) that <5% of applicants/admitted/enrolled are URMs.</p>
<p>InquilineKea, if your talking about my aeroacoustics work, then yeah, it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed my time and learned a ton. While I probably wont end up in acoustics in the end, I was still fascinated by the puzzles it presented and different research areas. If your talking of my golf practice system, then yeah it looks awesome but I haven't had the good fortune of working on the project yeah. All I really know about it is a little sample my mentor sent me and a draft of the highly technical patent application.</p>
<p>As far as scientific american level sources on aeroacoustics, I dont know of any. All of the stuff I have is very technical and has a lot of fairly heavy math and data analysis techniques.</p>