Speaker 1: So, you have your research idea, but you're unsure how to proceed. You've done a little bit of the reading, but you have no idea what questions to ask or how to ask them. This is where a research mentor can be immensely helpful. And in this video, I'm giving the only comprehensive guide on YouTube on how you can get a research mentor step-by-step, whether you're a high schooler or, heck, even a middle schooler looking to do science research. My name is Rishabh, and this is Part 3 of my science research playlist. Make sure to watch videos 1 and 2 if you haven't already. The link to the playlist will be down in the description below. These videos are intended for students who want to do research at the highest level. That means qualify for, you know, national or international level science fairs and win amazing awards or answer complex questions that satisfy their curiosity or even publish research papers. I'm now a freshman studying neuroscience at Harvard, and I make these videos to pay back to the science community that was so dear to me back when I was in middle school and high school. So to answer this question on the screen right now, how do I get a research mentor, we actually have to ask a couple other questions first. I want to make sure that you guys don't make the same mistakes that I did, and so I want you to ask the question, do I need a research mentor? Oftentimes, you'll find that your project, you can accomplish it on your own if you just do a lot of digging in, watching courses online on YouTube, for instance, and learning about the specific topic you're interested in. But at the same time, I understand you guys clicked on this video because you want a research mentor. I won't lie to you. Having one in middle school or high school for your research project is immensely helpful. It helps to have that confidence that, you know, at the end of the day, even if you make mistakes, you can bring those mistakes, you can bring your progress, keep trying again and again, and if it still doesn't work, your research mentor might be able to guide you into the right direction. And so that's immensely helpful. As you guys can see here, this is a snapshot from my Google Scholar page. Five out of the seven research papers that I've published were done in collaboration with a team or some sort of research mentor, and that was very, very helpful. I only have two projects. I'm also working on one or two new ones where I'm kind of leading the project completely, you know, from start to finish without a research mentor giving feedback. And so it is doable, but I just want to show you guys that having one can be helpful. But this video, that's exactly what this is about. Just some more examples. As you guys can see, back when I was in middle school, ripe old age of 13, 14, I was doing research without a mentor. But one thing I found was that you can start a research project without a research mentor, you know, come up with your idea, do your literature review, make some form of prototype or version one, and then bring this research to a research mentor who can bring your research to the next level by asking you the questions of, hey, have you considered this? Or, hmm, this technique doesn't look super robust. Maybe try this instead. But this whole process is difficult. I want you to know that even by the end of this video, I can't guarantee that you will have a research mentor for your project. I'm going to give you the best practices and best advice that I have so that you probably will be able to get one. But as you guys can see from this screenshot here, this was an email I sent back when I was in school. And as you guys can see, you know, you might not get replies sometimes. You might not find the right person for the project. And so you can fail at the same time. But failure is indicative of progress. I channeled that energy right into my project, and I competed at the National Broadcom Masters and won a prize. And so I want you guys to learn that, you know, even if you don't succeed here in getting a research mentor, continue with your project. You will be able to succeed. Before I jump into the guide, let me just show you a couple more images. These are from some recent projects. As you guys can see here, this is my junior year of high school where I actually did win ISEF first place in my category and the Regeneron Young Scientist Award. And this project actually started kind of independently, and then I was able to get a research mentor who was able to mentor me to take that to the next level. As you can see here for my senior year project, that was actually done at the Research Science Institute, or RSI. And so that was completely under a research mentor. And then I included this image right here, which you might not have seen before. This is actually from college. Now that I started here at Harvard, I'm doing research in the Department of Neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. And this is from a recent research poster that we had there. So as you guys can see, as you get older, tackle more complex ideas and more complex projects, you know, it does pay off to have that research mentor to collaborate with other people who have, you know, diverse skill sets and can help your research project. So without further ado, How to Find a Research Mentor by Rishabh Jain. Step one is to start your research project. And this is where I'm going to refer you back to the rest of the research playlist. It's going to include videos on how you can do a literature review, how you come up with your idea, or find your passion if you have no idea what that is. Once you've started your project, you know, at least completed some form of a literature review, understand some things, but have some questions, this is where finding a research mentor can be very helpful. So here's step two. I want you to start drafting an email. Here are three best practices that can ensure that you get a response from the people you email. Number one, you should have a very specific focus and it should target the mentor's expertise. You shouldn't go out and email random people. Let's say your research project is in pancreatic cancer pathology images. Don't just go out and email any sort of pancreatic cancer oncologist. You know, actually email people who work with pathology. I want you to actually read your mentor's papers and read the research they do so that you actually understand and can know if sending the email to this person is a good idea. Number two, your email should convey your passion and your interest significantly. In fact, that should be the core of this email. You are such a passionate young individual that this mentor will really want to help you out, will really want to hop on a Zoom call with you and spend some time discussing those questions because you will gain a lot from this. You genuinely care about this. You're not just, you know, slapping something on your resume. You're actually trying to do a research project. You should also allude to some specific questions that you have in the email itself so that the person can know if they're the right person to work with you or if not, they can forward your email to other people. Now, it is essential to have that last line saying, hey, I understand that this might not be your exact expertise. If you could forward me in the right direction to someone who could, that would be amazing. And I have a full email template for this in the description down below. It's hosted on my new website, Rishabhacademy.com. And so you guys can download that template. It's completely free. It'll have great practices and a whole template for you for sending this email out. Now, after you actually write this email, the reason why I want you to write the email first is because it gives you a better idea of what you're looking for before you just start going out there and searching for mentors. But number two, it'll also highlight some things that you can probably do for your project before you actually contact people. But now we're on step three, which is to collect those emails. And so I want you to go on Google and use this search string. You're searching for the area of the project and also including the string site colon asterisk dot edu. I know it's super strange, but basically this is going to limit your search requests down from millions of webpages to only webpages on an edu website. And that'll actually show you a majority of labs and people who are working on the topic that you suggested rather than a bunch of news articles from CNN. Now, I've also created a Google sheet template for you guys completely free once again in the description down below. I do want to help you guys in this process as much as possible. And so you guys can clone that template, add in the emails into this template, and it'll be super helpful when you're actually sending your emails. Trust me, I've done this before. So the email template is actually geared towards sending emails to research mentors. It'll have all the information you need to put in there, and that should be good. Step four, start blasting those emails. Go, go, go time. Now, people will often email 10 professors in a day, and then they'll just give up. They'll be like, hmm, no one responded. I don't want you guys to burn yourselves out, so I want you to send around three to five emails every single day. At the end of the week, you will have around 21 to 35 emails sent. At the end of the month, you'll have 80 to 120 emails sent. At that point, I guarantee you someone will have agreed to hop on a Zoom call with you and answer some questions. Step five is actually meet with your mentors, and this can be a very nerve-wracking process. I remember doing this when I was like a seventh grader, and oh boy, all those hormones and everything. I was not feeling it, and I was super nervous. I didn't know what to say, and I honestly kind of choked when I was talking about my project. Luckily, the guy I was speaking to, extremely nice individual who was explaining things to me and taking the time to make sure I actually understood them, and that was really helpful. But I understand that not everyone will be like that. A lot of people are extremely busy, and you don't want to waste their times. And so please don't be nervous. Let me guide you on what to do. Number one, I want you to read their papers beforehand. Search their name on the web, go to their Google Scholar or their lab website or something like that, and it'll include some papers. I want you to read through them. You don't need to understand every single term that they mention in these papers, right? You're not trying to become an expert in whatever projects your mentor is working on, but it is immensely helpful to roughly understand what they're doing. And oftentimes, the same lab techniques that they're using, for instance, flow cytometry, or algorithms that they're using, for instance, a convolutional neural network, will appear in your research as well. So learning about their research project, then you can actually ask some questions about, hey, how did you decide to use this? Or hey, how do I do this? I noticed you used this machine learning algorithm. How can I use that in my research project? Do you have any advice for me, any ideas? Number two is to ask genuine questions. I want you to literally write down a list of questions on a notepad or on your phone or something beforehand. If you're emailing professors from a local university, you can actually meet with them in person. Don't feel like you have to memorize those questions. Literally bring a notepad. It'll actually look good that you are showing interest in jotting down whatever they're saying and reading questions that you had pre-written down on there. It's completely fine. And same thing on a Zoom call. If anything, just say, hey, I'm just typing some notes there. It'll be completely fine. Now here's where you ask questions about how you can conduct your project as well as ask questions that skills and tools that the mentor has used could be helpful in your projects. You can ask about those algorithms and whatnot. Now at the end of the meeting, I want you to make a careful decision. So if the mentor has been able to answer a lot of your questions and they seem, you can kind of tell from facial expressions and whatnot, if they look like, hey, this person really appreciates the questions I'm asking them. It looks like they're being very helpful. Then at that point, you can go ahead and ask them that like, hey, if I have some more questions, would you be able to mentor me? Or hey, if I want to work on this project further, would I be able to meet with you every once in a while to check on it? Now trust me guys, this is the best case scenario. You don't want to be doing a project that is given to you by your mentor because you won't be interested in it. Instead, you want to do independent research on your own. Come up with an idea on your own. Do all the steps on your own. But have a research mentor who can guide you along the process. That way you learn all of the skills by yourself. You learn every facet there is to know about the area you're studying. And thereby, we'll be able to produce a high caliber research project that you can, I don't know, go to science fairs and compete with or even publish, right? That is the key to doing this. Rather than just asking a research mentor, hey, I'm interested in this. Can you give me a research project to do? You should come up with a project on your own and just occasionally ask them for advice. When you're stuck on something, ask them for feedback. Ask them for help. That is a way to approach this rather than getting someone who can spoon feed you. All right guys, so inevitably, you're gonna get some people who say no. They're gonna be like, hey, sorry, I just don't have the time to meet with you. I can't be your mentor. That's totally fine. This person is now someone you consulted as an expert. You ask them some questions about your project. You learn more about their field. That is really good for you as a student, especially middle schoolers and high schoolers, right? That is really good. Think of it, right? You started out with an independent project and had no opportunity, no lab that you're working with, and now you've gotten a chance to speak with an expert about the subject. This is a great learning opportunity and you can use this knowledge in all of your projects. Now, when you continue talking to people, this is why I say send three to five emails every day because you will have some more people that you can talk with over Zoom. And so you talk to these people, one or two of those might agree that like, yeah, hey, feel free to Zoom call me every month. I might be able to help you out with your research project. And that is a best case scenario. That's really awesome. But I kind of keep alluding to this one question from the beginning of the video, which is working with a group of people, you know, working with the mentor directly, not just asking questions every once in a while, right? And so this is a different type of mentorship, which I call a research internship, where you're assisting in the lab on a mentor's project and they're helping you do your task, but you're also helping them with their research project. And so this is a completely different type of thing than what we discussed in this video, which is more of independent research guided by a research mentor. This is something that I did back when I was in middle school and high school. And ultimately I won top awards with those projects and was able to actually contribute to science, like publish articles, have other scientists cite my work and whatnot. But there is this other facet of, you know, working in a lab and having teammates that you're in, colleagues that you're working with. And I call that a research internship. And I'm going to show you techniques for scoring those when you're in high school or even middle school. I've done it in the past. In high school I worked in a lab and ultimately was able to publish some research papers through that. And I enjoyed the process immensely. I learned a lot through it and it shaped how I am as a scientist today. I think it is something that is really crucial. And so I'm going to show you how to do that in the next video. So with that guys, please be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel so you're notified when I post the next video, which is going to be about that. Also be sure to download the template. It's completely free in the description below. And third, check out the playlist in case the next video has already come out. So see you next time.