Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion High school research experiences

Spinning this off from another thread.


In a situation like this one, why would someone even want to waste time in college?

Though TBH, I've begun to wonder about the depth of the research that high school students do. I'm a scientist, and I've taught undergraduates in a novel research-skills course that I designed. My students needed a LOT of guidance in a research lab, and they knew a lot more than high school kids. Plus, they were adults. I have serious trouble imagining that high school kids could do anything but trivial work in the vast majority of cases. While I do think that some PG+ kids could get below the surface, we all know how rare those kids are, and then you'd have to winnow that number to the ones who are also interested in working in a lab. That's not many kids compared to the number getting university research experiences.

I may be also jaded because a researcher I know has told me that the teenagers in the departmental labs enter information into spreadsheets (or something similar). They get non-critical tasks that don't require a lot of knowledge. I mean, seriously, how could a high school student have the kind of knowledge needed in a research lab?

This whole idea bugs me a bit --- not because I'm against the idea of kids getting experience in a research lab, but because the entire process seems to be more about gathering fodder for college applications and less about exploring a career possibility. It's the arms race aspect of it that gets to me (well, that and claiming that entering someone else's data into a spreadsheet for someone else to analyze counts as research).

Have you ever seen the Intel science fair? There really are some kids who do amazing science research in H.S. Although more and more of these top science fair projects are done when the students "interns" at a lab. And from what I hear the judges do sometimes telling have a hard time telling if the student is really doing the work, or just helping in the lab and writing the project up. It's one of the reason's they interview each student privately.

But the majority of these teens really do amazing work.

Well, to be fair, I've known a handful of people to get PhD dissertations out of what effectively was "running the machine" (using the instructions that came with it) and "generating data-- lots of data" (using someone else's protocol) and "analyzing data" (with the help of an advisor or blindly following a stats program).


And yes, some of my peers and I have, in point of fact, had the same criticisms of THOSE dissertations.

Some labs also operate such that EVERYONE that helps prepare a publication (via group meetings where it is edited) gets an authorship. It just really depends on the lab's culture.

Okay-- with that said, my 14yo did a research internship last summer. She specifically WANTED to get a feel for what being a lab PI was like, and had a mentor who embraced that and gave her a lot of oddball one-off tasks so that she could see it both good and bad. So things like dealing with IRB forms, snafus related to protocol approvals and grantsmanship, etc. etc.

Yes, she spent time harvesting data from raw subject recordings, and entering it into databases and spreadsheets, but she also got to look for patterns, help design additional elements of the investigative tool, etc.

She also wrote the M&M section of a paper-- and got herself a real authorship.

How typical is that?

Not very-- for the reasons that you listed, Val. DD was clearly in the top 10% of the students that we saw presenting their internship work at the capstone experience later in the summer, and these are SUPER-competitive internships. So competitive that pretty much no student outside of the top 20% of his/her graduating class even has a shot at being interviewed, and of the 800 or so students who applied, just 116 of them got internships last summer. DD, by virtue of her age (13 at the time), was ineligible to apply for all but about 20% of them, which had no age restrictions.

I don't say that as a shameless brag, but to indicate that probably most of the kids in those internships were MG+ to begin with, and that a fair number of them were HG+. Of the three other students that I know well enough to say, one is clearly EG, and the other is HG, and then there's DD.

This isn't most high school internship programs, though. Er-- well, maybe it is. I guess I don't really know. Given the big deal that one faculty member made of a (unsufferably preening) young man when introduced, gushing over the fact that he DESIGNED his own experiments, and was (gasp) getting a PUBLICATION out of his summer.

Well, yeah-- so did my kid, and three years younger than this youngster, and she seemed to think that was why MOST of them were doing internships to begin with.

So anyway, it may be that DD's experience was not terribly typical, and I suspect that this may be so, in fact. It's possible that faculty mentors who have been at this a while learn to winnow the wheat and chaff and offer a different kind of experience entirely to those students who are actually more capable. That's my suspicion.


What I actually find more objectionable is the practice of "science fairs" that have as an unspoken, unstated expectation-- that participants will have been "mentored" through a project by a university scientist or industrial contact that pays for supplies, sponsors the research effort, etc. etc. Kids who have all of that stuff at their disposal probably aren't the ones that NEED the money from a scholarship. {sigh} The kids who live rurally, etc. and have no contacts in their lives who are practicing scientists are the ones that I wish science fairs/talent searches were finding.


This is the same problem with "identifying" high achievers who are authority pleasers, and neglecting to find 2e students or PG kids who have tuned out or turned to behavioral issues because of boredom.

Well, for one thing, there is the issue of asynchronous development. For example, a top math student may not be college level in writing.

I have been amazed at some of the research being done by elite high school students (like the Intel Science winners). However, it is equally clear that these students have to have enough connections to get access to adequate labs.

There is also a huge difference between a high school intern who does mostly grunt work and gets her name appended to a research paper versus a high school students who initiates and directs the research. It may not be 100% clear but there are often some clues.

I do see why you are bothered but I compared it to the old days when apprentices started with all the grunt work and observation and only move up over time and with experience.

Er-- maybe.

I'm skeptical. I've known quite a few Howard Hughes fellows as undergrads, let's just say, and mentored a few of them, even. They're bright, all right. But they aren't independent researchers yet.

Nor are the INTEL kids. I dislike the obfuscation involved, that's all. Most of those kids are not doing all of their own experimental design, etc. They lack the breadth of experience to do so, to put it very bluntly. So pretending that the mentor has had nothing to do with that aspect of the project is disingenuous at best.

I think that being more transparent about the authentic accomplishments that these kids are actually doing themselves is a better thing.

After all, we have no trouble celebrating a young musician or athlete, even if they have coaching to do what they do, and even if they are "using" a work composed by someone else, or choreographed by another person, or a method developed by a giant in the field. That all seems okay and takes nothing away from the accomplishment.

Most of the INTEL projects that I've seen feted in the media quite honestly don't pass the sniff test for me this way. The details are such that they look a lot more like dissertation work than a one-year internship completed by a high school student who, recall, lacks an undergraduate degree in the subject, and can (at most) devote 20-30 hours a week to the endeavor. KWIM?

I worked the summer after high school for a govt-run science organization as an intern and although it's not the same thing as research it was similar in that much of it involved high level math modeling and other things way over my head. However, there was legit work involved-- stuff like putting streams of numbers into various databases and things that they would have had to pay a clerk to do anyway. I was probably less efficient than a clerk but I got more out of it than a typical GS-4 clerk would have. It paved the way for me to pursue an undergraduate EE degree and taught me things about holding down a real job (unlike the fast food jobs I had previously had; paid about the same). I suppose it isn't ideal but I have seen large government organizations waste more money with less to show for it. At some point, I do think society benefits when you take bright kids and show them the way forward. Unfortunately it does involve a modicum of babysitting (usually).

Like I said, I think that introducing kids to potential careers in a meaningful way is fine (great, even). But I'm suspicious about the claims of what they accomplish by themselves, and am sad about the arms race it's turning into.

Everyone has to be highly gifted, I guess.