Speaker 1: Hey there. My name is Rishabh. I'm studying computational neuroscience at Harvard college. And when I think back to high school, the single most valuable thing that I did was science research. Today, I'm announcing that I'm launching a 100% free course that will be put right here on my YouTube channel for very passionate, highly motivated students, the types of people who are probably watching this video right now. It's going to be all in one YouTube playlist and I'll release at least two videos a month for it. And these videos won't be highly edited videos where the goal is to constantly distract you and increase my watch time. They're not going to have those pattern interrupts every five seconds. I'm going to be putting together slideshows that are jam packed with resources and the most valuable information that has ever been available for students, 100% for free. And this video you're watching right now is the introduction to the course. And it's extremely important that you watch the rest of this video before the rest of the course, so that you're prepared and you have all of the resources that I'm going to give you. So first let me tell you the topics of every video that will be in the course. So you have a general roadmap and idea of what this is going to look like. If any of these questions you want answered, then Hey, this is the course for you. So first I'm going to teach you how to choose a science research topic. How do you figure out what you're passionate about? Then I'm going to go into a little bit of a side tangent where I'm going to teach what are the best practices and how can you identify and apply for high quality science research internships and programs, as well as how you can find a mentor for your science research project, if you're doing it independently, then I'm going to teach you how to complete a literature review from start to finish, what tools should you use, where can you find papers? How do you identify what resources and what sources of information are most important? Then I'm going to go into the importance of a hypothesis and research question and how you can form those. How do you actually come up with that question that you're dying to answer? Then I'm going to get into strategies for creating a research plan and a proposal. Then I'm going to go into tips for data collection and analysis and actually like doing your research. Then I'm going to go into recommendations for writing and presenting research papers, how to compete and win in science fairs, because I know that's something that a lot of my audience is interested in. It's something that I was really interested in and did in high school. And then finally, I'll go into tips for publishing research papers, if you've done a substantial amount of work. So next, let me introduce you to the major aspects of science research for high schoolers. So in this course, I will broadly categorize your research experiences into two main buckets. So the first is going to be independent research, where you kind of get the autonomy of doing research on a project of your own interest. Now this can be guided by a research mentor or by people who give you feedback, but for the most part, you are going to be involved in every step of the research process. And this is super cool because you get to learn how to do a science research project from start to finish. I had a lot of experience doing independent research projects in middle school and high school. And I was able to bring some of these independent research projects to the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, Broadcom Masters, the International Science and Engineering Fair, Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, and eventually catalyze some of these ideas to later become published in research papers. As for internships, the second type, they provide kind of the necessary context and experience of a real life science position. So you can actually understand how to pursue a career in science and learn the best practices of doing research. Cause typically when you do independent work, yeah, you learn from your mistakes. You'll get better and better as you go. But typically research internships involve students getting some kind of assistantship position in a lab or research center. And so you will learn that real life context of what it's actually like to do research in a lab setting, whether it's wet lab, you're sitting on a bench doing pipetting, or you're, you're in a computational lab where you have your laptop and you're writing code. So it's important to note that as an intern, you're not going to be conducting your own research idea per se, but you'll be working on projects that are given to you by the research mentor that, you know, you're working with or are assigned to. So in high school, I did research internships as well at the Oregon health and science university, which is where I'm from, um, a biotech company. And MIT, uh, more recently I'm doing research at Massachusetts general hospitals, department of neurosurgery, and that is a research assistantship position. So now that that's all out of the way, let me address two big elephants in the room. And again, this is kind of priming you to the style of this course, kind of what it's going to be like. Um, number one is a big elephant in the room, which is publications. And I know for a fact that a huge portion of the people watching this video right now want to see their name on a research publication. And I understand why, you know, it's extremely validating. It lets you actually contribute to a greater body of work, and it's really good for your resumes and college applications. However, research publications are tough and it's even harder to get your work accepted as a high school student, because you might not have someone who can advise you on writing a research paper. So the other YouTubers who make videos about these subjects will show their publications in journals, like the international journal of high school research or predatory journals that don't have extensive peer reviews and are kind of useless for advancing science. Cause they're not even indexed by. You know, databases or tools like Google scholar for other researchers to be able to find your work. Um, so it feels like they're kind of useless. They don't really serve any actual purpose. Furthermore, they often cost a lot of money and other people, other colleges, for instance, will not consider these publications to be publications. So I think this whole predatory scheme of turning research into a chargeable service for high schoolers is objectively wrong, which is why in this free course on YouTube, I'm going to focus more on giving you strategies to be able to build a track record of research that is far more meaningful than publishing in predatory journals, even if you aren't able to end up getting published in, you know, a high quality peer reviewed actual journal. I will give you other strategies and other resources. Cause I understand there's students of all sorts of interests of all sorts of calibers of all sorts of skill sets. So just for reference in high school, I was actually able to publish in BMC bioinformatics, nature, scientific data, and frontiers in oncology. I also presented at two conferences and gathered around 15 citations on my work just during high school. And so that shows you that it is possible for high schoolers to actually to the body of science and to the science community. And I hope to show you how to do that in this course. The second elephant in the room is science research competitions. Now you've probably heard about ISEF and are eager to meet like-minded students, um, and compete at, you know, the largest science fair in the world. When I was young, personally, I had a dream to one day go to ISEF and, you know, maybe have my name called up, maybe go on that stage. I'm extremely proud to say that I did. I qualified to ISEF, um, all four years in my high school. And in my junior year, I won first place in biomedical engineering, which was my category. And I won the $50,000 overall Regeneron Young Scientist Award. So to this day, um, almost two years later, I fondly look back at those experiences, the amazing friends I met at ISEF, the new experiences and all the learnings that I had. It was such a great experience, but now I must warn you, there is one huge danger associated with this. You can become blindsided in this race of just competing and completely forget the goal and purpose of doing research in the first place. So that's why throughout this course, I'm going to teach you how to do deep research, how to actually contribute, but also still optimize your research projects for competing. Because as a high schooler who competed at the highest level possible. Now a college student, I recognize how life-changing these events are. Oftentimes other people won't get it, how many friends you make, how much fun you have. I want to enable that for the next generation of highly motivated students for you. It is those competitions that I competed in that motivated me to apply for the Research Science Institute, for example, or RSI, where I was able to connect with 80 like-minded scientists for an entire summer who were just like me doing work and now here at Harvard, many of them are my closest friends. And we spent a lot of time doing homework together or discussing ideas. So it's just a great, great experience to compete in high school. And I'm not going to shrug away from that. Now, how do you prepare yourself for this course? So now that you have all this priming, all this information, um, I think one thing is back when I was in high school, I had an amazing community of peers who did science research and they were really just one text away. I could launch up iMessage and text them. And I made these friends at competitions like ISAF and JSHS and research programs like RSI. But I understand that not every student has this community available for them. I get tons of messages saying, Hey, Rishabh, I just competed in my science fair for the first time in 10th grade. I wasn't like you. I didn't start in middle school. You know, how do I get ahead? How do I meet other students? That's why I made an interactive discord server. I have a community of extremely bright, highly motivated students all in one discord server that I'm linking down in the description below. Um, you know, this isn't just for your average student to hop in and say, Hey, can someone review my college application? We're actually discussing, you know, the purpose for why we do those things for why we do science research, not just the end result. I hope that kind of makes sense. You know, these people are actually motivated to doing those things, not just the end result. And so you'll get great advice from voice calls and events that we regularly hold to help you. And I highly encourage you to scroll down and subscribe right now so that you get notified when each video in this series is going to come out. And you also join the discord server so you can begin connecting with other students. Um, oftentimes these students will even start working on projects together or things like that. So I'd highly recommend it with that. I'll see you soon in this course, uh, link to the playlist will be down in the description if it's already started.