Speaker 1: Research was the number one activity on my college applications. In fact, four of the top ten activities on my common application are based in research.

Speaker 2: Pratik, Pratik, that's great, but how do you actually get started on research?

Speaker 1: If you ask the NPCs online this question, they start spazzing out. Because if all you've done is a guided internship, where a professor gave you a piece of their project to work on for the summer, and then slapped you onto their paper as a third author, those are very likely the bounds of what you know about research. Now that in itself is a perfectly reasonable accomplishment, don't get me wrong, but there is so much more to the scientific process, so many more ways that you can get involved in research that I'd hate for you to go through high school not knowing about. It's kind of rare to meet people who have done lab research, independent research, and independent research in a lab, but luckily for you, I had no friends in high school. So let's get right into it. If you clicked on this video looking for a cookie cutter way to get into good quality internships, where you're getting everything you want out of it, right? The chance of getting a paper publication, good quality research and experience, something that you can put on your resume, as well as maybe get a little bit of pay and reward for it, then I'm going to tell you the by far best way to get involved in research. That is going to be through research programs, which you can find in many different forms with different sponsors across the nation. Essentially, the goal research program that you're looking for is a program that matches high school students like yourself to professors working in different colleges and universities. This might involve attending a handful of seminars or maybe just finding the program online and then submitting an application where you put in your transcript from school, your resume, and then you go through the different internships that are being offered by the program, and you basically like select the top professors that you would like to work with, and then you send in on your application and you wait. And hopefully at the end of this, you'll get matched directly to a professor where you then spend the next summer or a couple of months working on a research project with them. This will end in either some level of write up or like capstone to the work, or the work will end up getting published, which is the ideal end goal. To get a better sense of tangibly what these programs look like, I'm going to give you some examples that are very popular amongst students in Oregon. Now, all the resources to everything I talk about in this video are going to be linked in the description. So if you want to learn more about these, say you're from the Portland area, go ahead and check those links out. There's a really well-known program in Oregon called PSI, Partnerships for Scientific Inquiry, which works with Oregon's Health and Science University, which is like our famous med school in this area. And it matches high school students who are interested in doing science and research with researchers who work as part of these med school facilities across the state. Now, to get involved in this program, you basically just show up to a handful of seminars, and then you submit your application talking about the different research things that you're interested in, and then they match you to a mentor where you then spend the summer working on an internship. There's another program called ASC, it's partnered with Saturday Academy. And this is a program accessible to all students in Oregon, and I think in southern parts of Washington as well. Similarly, you send in an application to this program, you list like the top internships that you want to get involved in, and then they match you to a mentor. Now, the majority of you don't live in Oregon. So here's exactly what you're going to do. When I was a freshman in high school, and I wanted to get involved in research internships, I barely even knew that these programs existed. I didn't know until I was in my sophomore, junior year. And by that point, you're already pushing the boundaries of what you can do with your summers. There's only so many summers left. So if you're an underclassman in high school, I want you to get in contact with upperclassmen. Get in contact with as many as you can. You can contact them through social media, it can be your friends, older siblings, literally just reach out to them and ask them if they know of these kinds of research programs in your area. It can either be programs that they did, or it can just be programs they know of. So don't even start this conversation off by just asking like, have you done research? And then move on if they say no, just ask them if they've heard of these programs. And if they give you any names, anything that could seem reasonable, just do your research and apply as early as possible. If you can secure an internship in the summer between your freshman and sophomore year, you set yourself up for some incredible success later on, because you're already getting to a level that most students at that age, around 15 years old, haven't even gotten to. This is a great way to get involved in your first research experience. One of the major benefits of research programs is the fact that if you've never done research before, this is your easy way of getting guided through the process. You will literally have a mentor basically just telling you what to do, how to do it. And yeah, you're gonna have your independence, you're gonna be expected to like figure some things out, do some research at home, come in prepared, and then go ahead and go through the process. But someone has already planted the idea seed for you, the pathway is laid out, you just need to walk through it. Now let's say the area you live doesn't have these programs, or you're just not interested in them, they don't do the research that you like. Well, the good news is that not only do these universities do it locally with like little partnerships, but a lot of big name colleges, I'm talking Ivy League schools, schools that are in the T20, they provide the same, if not better opportunities to students all around the world, both United States and international students can apply to these. Basically, you can just Google like a college's name, and then like internship opportunities for high schoolers, you can see some of the ongoing research there, and if they have any programs, it'll be like very clear to apply to them, and go ahead and send in your information, and see if you can get in contact with some professors there to begin some research. A lot of times, college professors are a lot more receptive to working with high school students than you might think. So if you see these programs available at schools like Brown or Duke, go ahead and apply. The main difference here to note is that if you're going to be working with a university, in the past, the way it used to be is that you'd likely have to travel out there, right? A lot of these internships would need to have hands-on work being done. So you either have to do that on your dime, right? Paying the money or whatever you earn from the internship just goes into your living expenses to stay there for the summer. However, with COVID and everything that's happened, there are so many internships that you can do virtually. I had a friend do an internship online with Northwestern University, like a great school, and the research that they did was like fantastic. They were able to get into some great schools using that work. So the opportunities that you have are pretty much endless. There are also some really competitive research programs if you feel that you're a stronger applicant. If you've heard of MIT's RSI program, this is a fully funded research program where you basically go to MIT. It's like hosted by them, but there's another third-party program that runs it. And you go through a full summer of the research cycle. This is only applicable to juniors in high school, but there's a lot of like bragging rights and prestige that goes with this. It's a really cool thing to put on your college app because not everyone can get access to this internship. So if you're interested in those types of things, you can apply to programs like RSI as well. For anyone giving advice online, who's like reasonably well-versed in the research scene, this is kind of where the advice tends to end, just in the easy programs you can do online. But let's say you either have a little bit of experience with research or you're just curious, like, because that's all this next thing I'm about to tell you takes, just a little bit of curiosity and motivation from your end. I want to tell you how to get involved in independent research. Now, I did research in labs. I worked in two different labs during my time in high school, but a lot of the research I did was actually just done right out of my room, my bedroom room and in my garage because the research I did was purely independent and run by me. Prateek, what are you talking about when you say independent research? What I mean is the ability to go through the entire scientific process, everything that you do in a lab by yourself, driven by things that you are curious in. You will come up with a topic that you are interested in, an idea that you're passionate about, and then go through the process of advancing the science being done in that field. Now, this is not an easy task, and I think the best way I can exemplify what I mean by this idea is just by talking about some of the independent research that I did. So when I was in ninth grade, I began exploring the field of epilepsy. Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that's really personal to me. I have some family history of it as well. And so I just began digging into epilepsy. What is the current research being done? What is the current literature talking about? What are the advancements being made? What problems are still there to solve? And then what would I like to do? What am I interested in? And what can I tackle with the skill set that I have right now? So I began doing my digging into epilepsy, and I basically found that epilepsy detection is kind of unreliable. The techniques out there aren't as accurate in order to detect a seizure as it's ongoing in the brain based on different EEG-based signals. I don't want to get into like the technicalities, but also seizure prediction is something that I found super cool, right? Being able to predict a seizure before it happens. How can we go about doing that? What is the current research being said? Are there machine learning algorithms for it? Are people running different techniques? And I just began digging deeper and deeper and deeper into this topic. And essentially I found this niche within seizure detection and prediction that I really enjoyed. And so in order to get involved in it, I just started mimicking what scientists were already doing. I downloaded MATLAB. I had some prior experience with like a coding. I'd done some Arduino work as well. So I was trying to integrate that into my research. And I just started seeing how I could model seizures. What different techniques statistically could I use to examine seizures? And from there, I just started using all these different scientific thought processes. Like, okay, what new things can I apply? Can I take the average of the different seizure waves that are running in the EEG and try to find and isolate when seizures are happening? Can I run these different algorithms on these new kinds of biological data taken from seizure patients? Maybe that's heart rate. Maybe that's electrical activity in the muscles. Just going down a bunch of different trains of thought and pathways in my brain until I finally had an idea that was truly novel, something that was truly new. The hardest part for the overwhelming majority of people who want to get involved in research is coming up with the idea. So let's talk about that right now. How can you come up with an idea, some seed that you can build into a long lasting, strong research project? Something you can work on for multiple years in high school. The first thing is to just look around you. Start becoming cognizant of problems that you see in the world around you or just scientific topics that you're interested in. Now, if you're thinking about going to a field like the medical field, right? Maybe you want to go into engineering. You can try to pick a problem that's somewhat associated with the field that you want to go into because naturally that's where your curiosities lie. But it's also where if you dig deeper, those skills that you learn through the process will benefit you. So for me, I was interested in the medical field and I was interested in the brain. So epilepsy fit both of those targets. And the way I approached epilepsy as well with wanting to help people, that aligned with my goals and interests in the medical field. The next step is to dive into the literature. Now, I'm not telling you to go read like 50 page papers that just have so much jargon in them that you don't understand anything that's going on. The first step is just to get the basics down. Understand, for example, with me and my epilepsy research, like what is epilepsy? Who does epilepsy target? What are the main problems being faced by epilepsy patients? Why is epilepsy such a devastating neurological disease to have? And what current treatments are there? I just started by watching like YouTube videos and then reading like basic intro level articles, whatever comes up on the first page of Google. And then as you get a better understanding of like the fundamentals surrounding whatever issue or topic, you can go to scholar.google.com and then start searching for keywords. And what this will do is it will bring up like different papers and you can sort by like different dates. So you can go and read some of the most recent literature being done. And now your first thing is not to, again, go and just read through the entire paper. What you wanna do is you wanna like go through and read the abstract. See if you can understand just in that one introductory paragraph in the abstract, what is going on in the paper? What are the main takeaways here? And once you find a paper that like you're kind of starting to understand what's going on, now you can go and open up the paper and kind of skim through like a little bit of the introductory just to get an idea of where the paper is at and what they're targeting. And then mainly go into like their discussion and discourse. What new things do they find? What advancements are they making? Now, the main place that I feel people get a little bit distracted in is that once you get all this idea stuff sorted, what you're interested in, they don't know what to do about like the novel part. Your goal is to advance scientific research forward, right? When do you come up with like the brilliant idea that is suddenly in the news and makes you like famous locally in your city? Well, the truth is that idea doesn't just pop into your head overnight. It's not going to. How is it going to? In order for the idea to generate, to form like, oh shoot, I can analyze these specific seizure waveforms in this pattern using this algorithm and it's going to work with 90% effectiveness. That those like ideas have not even formed in the universe yet. You know what I mean? Like those haven't done because they need to come with time, with experiments, with measures. So the true best place to start is to just take research that's already being done and see if you can mimic it. You will learn so much from that process. For example, again, bringing it back to my epilepsy research, I was able to find papers online where people took the brain EEG, electroencephalogram waveforms and they analyzed it using different basic statistical metrics in the MATLAB software. So what did I do? I went, I downloaded MATLAB. It may or may not have even been a pirated software. Look, work with what you can and whatever resources you have. I can't tell you to do anything illegal on YouTube or else my channel will get striked, but do whatever you need to in order to get the resources that you can to do your research, right? And then from there, I just did everything I could to mimic that research. I applied the same statistical metrics, just analyzed the waveform. I learned so much about coding, putting together everything in the process. And then finally, when I got results and they kind of matched up the paper, I was like, yo, dope, this is sick. Like, this is super cool. And then from there, after you've gone through that, that is the hard part, right? After you've gone through both of those hard parts of coming up with the idea and then kind of mimicking some research that's being done and learning a ton in the process, now you have the framework to apply your own ideas. Okay, I have this code set up in order to achieve this goal. Now, what's next? What new models can I apply? What new data and codes can I do? Now is where you start looking into different things online. You're gonna use these papers to find like data sets. You're gonna find different sample codes that they reference in their paper. You're gonna find different papers that they also reference, which lead to more and more articles coming up. And at some point, you'll find what the main literature is in this industry, like the main frontier leading papers that are being published, who's citing them a bunch. And those all become your basis in order to build your independent research on top of. If you follow me this far into the video and you understand what I'm talking about until now, if you follow these steps and you continue to do them, then you will no longer really have questions about where to go with your work because everything will start to lead to a direction. You'll start to have ideas about where you can go next. Let your own curiosities take over. It's okay to fail. The whole process of research is going to be difficult. It's inherently difficult because you're pushing the boundaries of what we as humans know. You are inventing new knowledge. Do you know how cool that is? You are going through that whole process, so you're going to hit roadblocks. You're not going to be sure what to do. And it's in those times that you can take a step back, right, relax a little bit, think about new ideas, read some new papers, and then proceed with your work. When it comes to independent research, it doesn't actually have to be 1000% independent, just you. The truth is that once you get involved in some of this research, you can actually reach out to the people who either wrote some of the papers that you really like or just other mentors or people who work in colleges and universities, anyone you meet through networking who might be involved somewhat in this field and could give you some guidance. You can reach out to them. You can talk about some of the research work that you're doing, and they might be able to provide you with some new ideas to keep pushing your work forward. They're going to start poking and challenging your thoughts in ways that you didn't necessarily think of because it's nice, right? Someone with a fresh perspective is looking at the work that you're doing objectively. So if you find yourself hitting roadblocks, this is also a great time to see if there's someone you could reach out to, someone who can advise you and help you. And if you're a high school student doing all of this, dude, adults are more than willing to guide you and help you on this process. They just want to see you succeed. If you're interested in their work as a 15, 16 year old, some like a 40, 50, 60 year old like woman who's working on the same research in her own lab, she'd love to help you, dude. Just ask them to get on like a little bit of a call. Say that you're at this stage in your like your research. You've been really interested in it. You love the papers that they did on X and Y. And then just ask if they'd be willing to chat for a little bit. And once you get on that call, they'll be able to guide you a little bit more through that process, give you some new ideas. Another kind of core thing about going through this independent research process is competing in science fairs. One of the main benefits of being able to do research by yourself is the fact that this research is yours. It is your intellectual property as long as you've gotten to like that novel idea generation stage. So you can take all that work that you're doing and apply to science fairs. There's going to be like local science fairs where you will compete with like the traditional trifold poster board. You present your work to judges. You win awards. There's also a bunch of online competitions you can apply to as well. Just shoot your shot with a bunch of them, because once you have the framework for your presentation ready, all your research is in place, you can just basically use the same template and apply to like as many competitions as you have the time for. And I'm telling you, if you will just shoot your shot, like with a shotgun approach to a bunch of places, one of them is bound to work out. And when it does, you're going to be like, you know, rewarded with awards, with prize money. You can lead to have new internships and contacts, new people. It's just a great like self-fulfilling process. And it kind of gives you a timeline for your research as well. If you compete in science fairs every year during the springtime, which is when they're pretty like pop in and go in, then that way every year, you're kind of pushing yourself to get to new bounds, new limits with your work. And it doesn't just seem like a kind of never ending process. You should also aim to get your research published in some journals. There's a bunch of like high school journals that are pretty good. One that I really recommend is the Journal of Emerging Investigators, JEI. It's run by like Harvard grad students. And I really like the way that they went about the publication process. Once your research is at that stage, definitely go ahead and write up the paper and then send it in for like review. And if your paper gets accepted and you're able to get it published, that is so sick. Like not only would you have learned so much from the process, but in order to put like a paper on your college application, like it gives so much validity to the research work that you're doing and you're a first author of it. You're the main author on the paper that is just so gassed for any high schooler. Now, let's say you're not able to get access to any of the research internships I've just mentioned, as well as you're not able to get involved in independent research for some reason. There is another like last ditch effort option in order to secure some kind of research. Now, this is kind of like the most scuffed thing I'm going to be talking about in this video, but it is still an option. It's even something that I did in my freshman year of high school. What you can do is just mass email a bunch of professors at your local university. What you can do is you can go to like the professors, like a website or page. You can read up on some of the research they're doing and you're going to have some level of a template email where you basically just change out what research the professor is doing and what you're interested in contributing to their lab. And just email this to like as many professors as you can, like aim for like somewhere between 20 and 30 professors and you'll be able to score like one opportunity or internship out of it. Basically, just email them talking about your willingness to contribute something to their lab. You're not interested in like looking for like pay or anything like that. You just want to get experience. That's the main goal of this. So go into it with the idea that your goal here is to learn about the research process and get experience. And once you show up to this internship, you're able to get that opportunity with some professors, someone who's even if it's not the exact field that you're interested in, because if you're just looking for like biology specific internships, you're probably not going to get it because you need to have the range of people that you like sent emails to in order to have something work. But you're just going to show up there with an open mind. See what you can learn about science. We can learn about the process. This is, again, an internship that you can still put on your college application resume. Just don't go in there expecting pay, but rather expect that reward in terms of knowledge, as well as like if you do a really good job there, you can get more opportunities in the future, as well as maybe even a recommendation letter out of it. The thing about research is that you can't fake it. Colleges know when they look at your resume and they see two publications on there as you being the first author that you put in that level of incredible work. Anyone can really go do a thousand hours of volunteering. It's not inherently hard. You just go do it. But not everyone can invent something new. Not everyone can apply their mind to science with dedication for years to advance a field in a way that actually helps other people to leave behind the legacy in a field that can bloom into so much more that can go on to actually help people in the future to change lives. That in itself is a beautiful process. No matter how big or small, always remember to be proud of yourself for what you contribute to science. Thank you all so much for watching. This has been Pratik. I'm out.