If you are a high schooler or a parent of a high schooler, I am sure you have heard that the holy grail of research is to cold call a professor, enter their lab, and publish a paper with them. While this sounds amazing, few students can accomplish this feat, and those who succeed usually have some other way into the professor (such as a parent contact). In this blog, we explain why this process is so difficult, and how our students get there.
Why is it hard for a high schooler to get work with a professor?
To understand why this path is hard, one needs to understand the demands on a professor. In AIClub, all of our mentors have Ph.Ds, meaning we were once graduate students who worked with university professors, and still do now frequently. We have a direct understanding of the day to day demands on a professor and what makes this access path challenging.
Professors have many demands on their time. In addition to mentoring research, professors often write grants for funding, teach, and perform other administrative and service activities such as conference program committees.
Mentoring a student is a significant time commitment. For this reason, professors often prefer graduate students, and even then Ph.D students relative to Masters students. The return on investment is much greater since the student is with them for longer. I have even had professors tell me they will not take high school students since most high school students are just looking for an accomplishment to leverage for college applications.
How can a high schooler get into research with a professor?
The way to impress a professor is to show demonstrated interest in their specific research areas. This does not mean they are a computer science professor and you think you like computer science. It means that you can point to specific accomplishments in your background that show deep exploration of very targeted computer science research.
The other key way to impress a professor is to demonstrate that you have the commitment, experience, and aptitude for research. This means being able to point to past research works. The more prestigious the better. Note that while science fairs are of great importance in the high school world, not all professors know of these or care to. The university research world and professors are measured by the professional publications they generate, not high school awards or high school journal publications.
How to get started?
Sounding like a chicken and egg? To get to do research with a professor you need to have done research? This is where we (the AIClub Research Institute) comes in.
Our students do in-depth, state of the art research in a range of topics, guided by our Ph.D mentors who are each independently recognized and respected in their fields internationally for their accomplishments.
Our students research has led to many publications, often in professional journals. Of our students who have published research, 77% have published in professional venues. These are the same professional venues that professors and their graduate students publish in, and their peers have reviewed and accepted these publications. Our students have seen research acceptances in prestigious venues such as NeurIPS, AAAI, IEEE, ACM and SPIE. Having a paper in any one of these sends a powerful signal that you are ready to hit the ground running in a university research lab.
This experience gives students the opportunity to reach out to faculty with not just interest but impressive credentials. Our high school students are often better published than many entry level graduate students! We have seen students, after working with us, use their accomplishments to land research positions in prestigious university research labs (such as MIT CSAIL) and even in corporate research labs (such as Merck Drug Design).
And yes, along the way you may also win a bunch of science fair or other high school awards 🙂
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