Comment by polyfractal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by polyfractal | Hacker News Reader

This is very cool, but the article is also very light on details. I have some experience with this competition and the field.

Intel ISEF is like the world championship of science fair projects. Its a very cool competition and a wonderful experience. I attended the 2003 ISEF in Portland, Oregon for my project on distributed computing. Hands down the best experience I had in high school.

However, there is a huge disparity between the projects in medicine/biology and everything else. I completed my project entirely on my own with no mentors. Many other CS and engineering projects were similar. The projects in medicine and biology, however, were conducted at a local university under the guidance of faculty and staff, simply because these experiments are not something you can perform at home. They also raked in a disproportionate amount of the awards.

Having switched to biology in college and now working in a lab post-graduation, I've seen the type of work most undergrads and high-schoolers perform. Even if they are intellectually committed, much of the work is actually performed by others in the lab. Undergrads, and especially high-schoolers, often serve as support roles rather than investigators. Obviously this varies to some degree depending on the lab.

My point: Awesome that this student won, and awesome that this is helping to guide her into biology. But, I doubt she did most of the work. Nanoparticle treatment of cancer is not exactly a new idea, so she is likely working under a post-doc who has been working on this for some time.

Looking back at my post, this comes across very curmudgeonly. Perhaps I'm just disappointed that ISEF winners tend to be those helping out professional projects rather than those who design and build the project entirely on their own, or with minimal mentor help.

Edit: to clarify my point, assume a HS student gets out of school at 3pm and work until 5pm, five days a week. That's a lot for a HS student. Unfortunately, 10 hours a week isn't going to get anything done in biology. A single western blot takes longer than 6 hours to run. Hell, I work 50+ hours/week and progress is still very slow.

I've always wondered about this. In a similar state level competition, I felt like a giant hillbilly because all the projects were so damn awesome compared to mine (terrible feeling when you've put months upon months into a project only to walk into a room and realize you don't have the slightest chance in the world to win). Some of those awesome projects were definitely home-brew and were better than mine, but even those paled in comparison to the ones that came with professional help.

Growing up two hours away from the nearest real university, I didn't realize teenagers could work on projects like those. It rankles my sense of fairness that many (though certainly not all) of the people in the upper levels of the science competitions got there with a very large amount of help.

Of course, the same logic would apply to people who have even less access to resources than I did, so I should count my blessings.

Same here, I went to our state science fair in 8th grade (late 90s) I really felt that most of the experiments there far outstripped the abilities of an 8th grader.

In fact one of the biggest disparities was in price, I had maybe $100 budget, and that was after I upgraded my project for the state level. Many of the experiments there looked to be at least 10x more expensive.

These high school placements into university labs are a classic example of how privilege plays out, converting socio economic status into plausible credentials. Connected parents get glamorous internships for their kids that massively overstated the kids' contributions to and translate into elite college placements.

No one can say these kids aren't smart and deserving, but what about kids who are also smart and deserving but not related to researchers or their friends? I prefer math contests where any kid who can reach the library has a downtown tty good opportunity.

"I prefer math contests where any kid who can reach the library has a downtown tty good opportunity."

It's funny that you mentioned math, because I thought about it while reading the rest of your message.

In my university I know many (over a dozen) people who had their math degree (or most of it) done in high school/are in high school and are currently pursuing it. Virtually all of them (all but one) have a parent who's professionally into mathematics (most have parents who are PhDs or professors of math, another parent has a PhD in electrical engineering, etc.).

You are absolutely going have some familial encouragement and support in any field. I was one of few of my math peer group in high school and college who didn't have Ph.D parents. (I had plenty of support, and but not direct parental direction in math. They drove me to the library and to my math team practice before school. I can't imagine how they could have given me nearly as much support in chem lab... And I even did a college chem lab one summer in high school, as part of a math summer program!)

I call bullshit on the 'privilege' claim. Colleges are recruiting from extra curricular activities, clubs and honor societies. They reach out to those kids and offer them a chance to go to 'summer camp' and often offer financial aid to those who qualify but can't afford it.

I would not disagree that if you are in a position where you have to work to support your family while you are going to high school a number of opportunities are unavailable, but that represents a much smaller group of kids.

You take any smart and deserving kid and have them participate in activities that the universities are watching, and they will reach out. Take the SAT or PSAT and make your scores available and they will reach out. Go to university websites and email the professors who are working on interesting projects and they are often happy to share information with you, and if you are 'smart and deserving' they will reach out too.

I would say this is an unrealistic view of how elite college admissions work.

These days, having perfect SAT scores, good grades in AP/IB classes, and ordinary involvement in extracurriculars is a weak approach to getting into an elite university. It takes some extra-ordinary achievement in some extracurricular to make you stand out from the mass.

That kind of extra-ordinary achievement is easily gamed by people with privilege but much more difficult for the rest of us in the 99% (well, the 90%).

having perfect SAT scores

Having perfect SAT scores, that is literally at the peak of the scoring scale on all test sections, is still quite rare.

http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/SAT-Percen...

All students with perfect SAT scores could fit comfortably into the entering class of just one of the eight Ivy League colleges, with none left over for MIT, Stanford, Caltech, or any of the other seven Ivy League colleges.

The mathematical consequence of this (by the pigeonhole principle) is that all elite colleges, without exception, admit many students who missed questions on the SAT. Caltech is almost the only college with a small enough entering class to have a possible chance of having a majority of enrolled students with literally perfect SAT scores. The interquartile score ranges reported for the most recent first-year class at Caltech

http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...

show that even Caltech has to enroll a majority of new students who missed questions on the SAT.

I am of course fully agreed that a strong application to colleges that selective includes not only high test scores and high grades in challenging subjects, but also involvement in some meaningful extracurricular activity.

Well, yes, meaning that elite colleges use other discriminators to choose their students now, once you've gotten a good-enough score. It'd actually be more egalitarian and meritocratic to use scores, though, especially if there were a revised test to differentiate the almost-perfect-and-perfect crowd from one another.

Those other filters--the meaningful extracurricular activities--often enough amount to "let's let in the girl who got a paper published in high school through a special internship or the guy who climbed Mt. Everest" that they're sort of a joke, in that people with special resources and parental connections have an automatic edge over equally qualified people who don't.

I wasn't talking about college admissions, I was talking about a university professor extending help to a high school student with a science fair project.

The OP wrote:

"These high school placements into university labs are a classic example of how privilege plays out, converting socio economic status into plausible credentials."

And I don't believe that is how this high school student connected with the lab she worked in (some sort of privilege connection) and I don't believe it is how the majority of kids who are participating in the ISEF and other competitions 'get into' university labs to do their work.

If you're working on an ISEF project or other high profile science fair organization project, and you are a good student who can communicate what you are working on, you don't need wealth or privilege to get a university professor in the same area of research to read your email and respond.

I reacted emotionally to the author's implication that only 'rich connected kids' even have the opportunity to do well in these science competitions because their social status gives them connections and resources that are not available to others, and so the work they can do will always be more impressive than what other kids can do.

It's the way life works. If we reigned in the best achievers to the same level of achievement as the worst level of achievers to make everyone 'equal' then we might as well just fire off all the nukes cause humans would be doomed. Read some Atlas Shrugged, the bottom of the pyramid is necessary. Without it we'd have a flat line, and you know what else is a flat line? The way a no longer beating heart reads on an EKG in a hospital.

erm, perhaps instead of pulling the meritorious down we propel the others up?

coming from the other side: in HS, I did a science fair project relating to the effects of various carotenoids on cancer cells in vitro. I (top part of the class) didn't even really understand what a carotenoid was; my HS, as is probably typical, did not have an organic chemistry class. The only reason my project was anything impressive is because my dad runs a cancer research lab and could foist me off on his grad students. It was a great experience, and I learned tons about what laboratory biological research is like, but it wasn't really my own original effort.

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