Landing Research Opportunities in High School!! 👩‍🔬🔭 | Stanford Admit Talks

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES MENTIONED
ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair) -- sooo many Stanford admits have competed in this
Search online for more of these research programs for high school students!

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Ines (from Madrid, Spain): @inessalter

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VIDEO "SPARKNOTES"
1. Programs matching high school students with institutions looking for interns
- Apprenticeship in Science and Engineering (HP & OSU)
- Look on the internet
- Varies by region and physical location
2. Cold Emails
- Honestly, I just emailed a few professors and personalized my cover letter to their research papers. But I was very lucky because I only had to send about 6 emails and I already got 2 offers... but some friends who were equally qualified if not more sent 100+ emails"
3. Network with teachers at your school
- "For my research opportunities, I was very lucky to be 15 minutes from a research university (University of California, Irvine) so I had a research mentor who was a chemistry graduate student helping me with some research projects for various competitions. I was able to connect with him through a science teacher at my high school. I also had two mentors (PhD students at UCLA) last year who I was able to connect to through the California NanoSystem Institute’s Nanovation competition at UCLA. I also look for research opportunities by looking up various programs at the closest university (for me, that would be UCI) and I could easy find a couple programs."
4. Network through science fairs
- start from home
- do the simple tasks and ideas you like
- explore various fields and take a couple niche courses if necessary. once you build up that repertoire, you're going to have a much stronger resume and cover letter too
- "I did science fairs to start, and I would even network with the judges and things like that. Most of my mentors are graduate students doing research themselves and I got to know them through science fairs and competitions.
- Also, I can't even count on like 5 hands the number of Stanford admits who did ISEF at least once."

[irisfu]

🔔SUBSCRIBE & turn ON your notification bell if you haven't already! Welcome to the fam :)

[jakemoseley]

I’m so old that we didn’t need to resort to extreme measures to get into top colleges. But it may be informative to know that my roommate at Yale, while in high school, wrote to Edwin Land, the inventor who founded Polaroid, with questions about how vision works. John did that solely because he wanted to figure out some specific things about vision, not to get into college. And Land wrote back to him and they corresponded on the topic for years. Reach out, people love to help young students.

[krishpatel]

I've always looked for a video like this but never found one. Thanks for making it!

[levelthefield]

YOU ARE SO HELPFUL AND INSPIRATIONAL UGHGHH I LOVE YOU AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH

[bohuazhang]

Thank you very much for giving us so many helpful tips for college admissions! We appreciate your help and best of wishes and luck at Stanford!

[ntruesdale]

You are so well-spoken. And I love the name Iris.

[maileruiz]

What would you include in a cold email? How do find what a professor is interested in?

[grunklecream]

Hi! This video was super helpful, I’m just starting high school and was just wondering when you think would be a good time to start trying to land research opportunities. I’d feel unprepared if I only had a few sciences classes before getting involved in something like this! What are the base classes you think I should have done before applying for something like this?

[selenezz]

OMG you always give me surprise in the morning😭Sooo helpful

[sinlich]

Hey, Iris! Your videos are really helpful, thank you so much!
I’ve searched research opportunities in business, management, marketing fields, but couldn’t find any yet.
Thank you for the info, I will keep searching! 💌

[micah]

Ahh thank you! This is so helpful! Keep up the hard work! :)

[lucaskim]

Thank you so much for this video! It was very helpful!

[everythingtemi]

Thanks for this video, but I feel as though research opportunities are mainly for people who want to do something that involves science. I don't know what I want to do, but I'm sure that it will not be anything hugely tied to science.

[abbeylussier]

okay so this video is a couple weeks old so you may not see this but what does research entail exactly?(this may seem like a dumb question, and I know it varies from person to person, but I’m curious!)

[jiwonkim]

Thanks so much! I am applying for one in the next week or so... wish me luck!

[anti-hero]

Where do you find the professors. Like how do you select who you want to send an email to.

[autumns]

what's a cover letter? also all of your videos are helping me out so much thank u!!

[ekaterinapopova]

Hi!! Loved your suggestions and I really enjoy most of your videos, which are incredibly insightful and informational!! I just wanted to ask if you think that I could try this sort of strategy for research regarding political science or do you think that there aren't that many research opportunities in social sciences?

[hannahzhou]

Thank you this is so helpful! Quick question, when you reach out to professors, do you have a specific topic or do you ask for research opportunities?

[evilgriffing]

How long did your research go on for in terms of hours per day and how many weeks it went on for? I want to do research this summer and am trying to plan out when to do it.