By Daniel Evans, Ph.D.
“Ever since I was a young child, I looked up at the night sky with wonder, and imagined how the stars and planets came to be.”
Over my many years as a professional scientist, I have read this statement in more applications for science competitions and student research positions than I can possibly describe. For one competition in particular, I review about 30-50 applications from talented high school students each year. Here’s what the average applicant looks like:
You are President of a high school STEM club. Your SAT scores and GPA are strong. You’ve probably competed in math and science olympiads. Maybe you play a musical instrument and do debate. You kind-of dabble in sports, but it’s clear that sports aren’t your passion. Your service contributions are the occasional, generic kinds that you think look good on applications, but that don’t demonstrate any genuine interest or excitement. You did a research project within your high school, or (better) with a professor at a local university, which you then wrote up and submitted as part of your science-talent entry. It’s decent, but didn’t really articulate that you pushed boundaries with your research.
I’d say that about 90% of the applicants look like this, to a greater or lesser degree. All of these students are clearly very smart, but the generic nature of their applications makes it incredibly hard for such students to stand out in the eyes of the judges. Not only that, but, common to this 90% is a failure to realize that science is an interconnected and innovative pursuit that requires leadership, resilience, and persistence. Science is anything but easy or straightforward.
So, how do you stand out when it comes to prestigious national STEM competitions? Here is what it takes:
1) Near professional-level research. By far and away, this is what differentiates those who get serious consideration and those who don’t. I usually see 5 or 6 entries per cycle that fit this bill. Yes, this is a tall order, but students are really achieving this level of work, and some of the entries have even been accepted for publication by a professional, peer-reviewed journal by the time I read about them. When I see this, I know that I have a student who has actually pushed back the boundaries of the field, and I have no doubts that I’ve found a serious contender. But to figure out who is really among the crème de la crème, you also need to show strength in the following 4 areas.
2) Substantial novel or interesting extracurriculars. The extracurriculars from the best applicants I’ve seen demonstrate a sense of innovation and entrepreneurialism to them: they actually “created” something enduring. This is hard to achieve, but students do it, and it impresses tired judges. The most generic extracurriculars in science-talent competitions are the science club/math olympiad/orchestra activities I lamented above. Frankly, I’d rather see a sense of grit emerge in a student’s application after learning that she had waited tables for 20 hours/week at Red Lobster while still keeping up her studies.
3) Strong choice of research mentor. It’s really great to read applications where the student has proactively reached out to a professional research mentor, rather than been “assigned” a high school one, or (worse) having done research with a parent at home. Beyond that, the best applications demonstrate that the student collaborated with her mentor to choose a research project, and the student didn’t just analyze a bunch of old data that the mentor had lying on a disk.
4) High quality of writing. Once more, the best research write-ups and essays demonstrate an exceedingly strong tenor of discourse. They have well-motivated conclusions that not only make a succinct argument, but also point to areas of new inquiry. The worst research write-ups simply conclude that the research project had insufficient data from which to draw meaningful conclusions. Rarely, I see research write-ups that portray incredibly complicated mathematical proofs, but don’t motivate the importance of the research in the first place. Beyond these broad brushstrokes, the smaller details also matter: plots should be made using better tools than the standard output on Excel; the student used LaTeX to write the report, etc. One final hint: lose the passive voice! Professional scientists don’t write in that tense in journal articles and it comes across as weak.
5) Stand-out letters of recommendation. Science-talent competitions often require two letters of recommendation: one from a high school teacher, and one from the research mentor. The best letters I’ve seen ditch bland platitudes and go straight to addressing a student’s grit, determination, and collaboration. I want to know what obstacles a student has faced, and how that student has tackled them.
Finally, I’d like to offer a quick note of encouragement: it’s exceedingly rare for me to see five-tool players, namely students who hit all of the above points. Of the hundreds of applications I’ve read over the years, only a small handful have achieved this. That’s OK! If you manage to hit, say, four of the five above points you’ll still be in an elite cadre. Again, remember what modern science is about: innovation, interconnectivity and, perhaps above all, grit.
Dr. Daniel Evans is an astrophysicist whose research interests include the astrophysics of supermassive black holes and the formation of relativistic jets. He gained his PhD from the University of Bristol, did postdoctoral fellowships in astrophysics at Harvard and MIT, and was a Professor of Physics at Elon University. He has held positions at the National Science Foundation and the White House, and has worked at NASA since 2015.
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