High school students worked on research projects with UC Santa Barbara graduate students and faculty this summer in programs designed to help younger learners jumpstart their academic careers.
The six-week Research Mentorship Program (RMP) and four-week Science and Engineering Research Academy (SERA) guide students through research projects and presenting their findings.
Students in RMP take two university-level courses in addition to doing research, and the classes teach students how to organize their findings, write, present, and pitch their projects.
The amount of work that students go through is intensive, and the results speak for themselves, says program director Dr. Lina Kim.
“We had faculty go up to students and ask ‘What year in graduate school are you?’ When they learn that they’re high school students, the professors are shocked at how much they’ve learned in six weeks,” Kim said.
Mary Qiu, a 16-year-old old high school student from San Francisco who stayed on UCSB’s campus during the RMP program, researched media preferences and political identification for her project.
Qiu said that though she had heard about RMP before, she really became interested in the program when Kim came to her high school to talk about it.
“It’s really hard for high school students to find research positions or be exposed to research by themselves so this was a good pathway to link you up with mentors,” Qiu said.
RMP participants hear pitches about possible research projects during their first week, and decide which ones they’d be interested to work on.
Still, the final presentations were not entirely dictated by the graduate students.
“I was the one who proposed that it should be focused on political identification. There was actually a lot of room for my ideas in this project,” Qiu said.
Qiu said the biggest lesson from the program was, “How tough research really is. When you’ve never really exposed to research, you have this vision of what it looks like but when you actually do research that a graduate student would do over the course of a year in five weeks you really feel a sense of urgency.”
Students in the program build up comradery over time through organized social events, such as trips to Disneyland.
“I think the best part of this program was the people.” Qiu said. “My mentors and my peers really helped me through this challenging process.”
Participants in RMP and SERA have the option to either commute from off-campus or stay in the UCSB Santa Cruz Residence Hall, which is only a short walk from the beach.
Qiu said she really enjoyed living on campus.
“Santa Barbara’s really nice. You’re right by the beach and right by IV so it’s got a really chill vibe,” she said.
In 2016, SERA was created as a sister program to deal with the excess of qualified applicants for the RMP program, which receives hundreds of applications every year and accepts only 75.
SERA is also focused on research, but accepts more students, with 96 participants this summer, and has a less intense admission process, Kim said. For the SERA program, students pick one of four research tracks and present their research findings in a group of their peers.
— Noozhawk intern Dhiraj Nallapaneni can be reached at news@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkSociety, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.