How to Navigate Research Opportunities for College Applications

SAM: Okay, great. I feel like I’m obligated to say you’re my favorite CEO, Daniel, but you are, truly. So, my favorite, favorite boss. So yes, I am Sam Luby. I’m really excited to talk about today’s topic. I’ve been doing college admissions for over a decade, on the admissions side, the college side, and also on the high school side. I would also say my passion is, my biggest passion, is definitely college coaching and college admissions, but a big part of how I do that passion is through research. So, I’m actually a research fellow at Florida State University where I study education policy and large data sets. Specifically, my project is looking at studying the Common App and the matriculated student data coming into FSU and trying to figure out how what they do in high school relates to student success in college. So, I’m very passionate about research, very passionate about this topic, quantitative, qualitative research. Really excited to talk about those different areas and spaces. So, with that being said, Daniel, I’ll take it back to you.

DANIEL: Awesome, thank you. Go ahead. I think really quickly, there are a few things I want to share. Sam and I just introduced ourselves, but first we want to give you a sense of who Prepory is, and Sam, if you want to move along to the next slide.

SAM: Okay.

DANIEL: Just a tiny bit about us. This might be your first time hearing about us or maybe you discovered us on this webinar through a family friend, but really quickly, we just want to share that Prepory has been doing this work for over a decade. In our time doing this work, we’ve worked with students, over 14,000 students, all over the globe, students in over 70 different countries, and last year, 94% of our students got into one or more of their top five schools. Our kids and our families are really happy and having great outcomes. Because of the sheer size of our organization, how many team members we’ve got, and how many students we’ve served, we’ve got a really big data set of what it takes to be a winning applicant to research programs and eventually colleges in this process. One more thing I want to say is actually our Q&A is open. So as Sam goes through our presentation this evening, we do have an active Q&A, and we’ll have a live Q&A towards the end of our webinar tonight. If you guys have any questions at any time, you can drop that in writing or you can hold those questions and we’ll answer them live towards the end of our call.

And really quickly here are some of the logos, just a few of the logos where our students have earned acceptance into research or really competitive research summer programs at all sorts of organizations. So places like MITES, MIT RSI, Yale Young Global Scholars, the M&T program as well, as well as Stanford’s Medical Immersion Research Program, Georgia Research Institute internship. So, every year, around this time of the year, is when we’re really gearing up to support our students to do their research applications because a lot of these deadlines, Sam, correct me if I’m wrong here, tend to be December, January, February.

SAM: Absolutely. And a lot of these logos probably you guys haven’t really seen before, just because they do fly under the radar as these prestigious research and high school research programs but are really essential in these Top 30 competitive applications. And Daniel’s very right. I would say most applications are going to be opening up right about now and MIT, the RSI program is the first deadline, which is usually around December 10th, December 15th. So, the urgency is here. It’s timely that we’re doing this presentation tonight.

DANIEL: Yeah, I agree.

SAM: So yeah, I’ll take it from here, Daniel, and go through the agenda and kick this off.

DANIEL: Of course. Go ahead.

SAM: Sounds good. Yeah, really excited to go through tonight’s presentation. We’re going to do a deep dive into why research matters in college admissions, and then looking at how it fits in different places in the application, how to find credible opportunities to pursue those opportunities and research strategies for you beginners who maybe have never done research before or not even really sure what research is, and we’ll talk about how that looks, and then seeing how Prepory can help you make that stand out in the application and what we do to really help students prepare for this opportunity or opportunities, hopefully. And then as Daniel mentioned, we’ll have a live Q&A at the end. I’ll let him take questions as we go as far as in the chat. But Daniel, if you feel like there’s a really good one, we should talk about, feel free to stop me, okay?

DANIEL: Will do.

SAM: Okay, so we’re talking about just why research matters in college admissions in general, right? In order to really answer this question, we kind of have to sit back and kind of learn what the admissions process is looking for when we’re applying to undergraduate institutions in the United States. These three buckets come specifically from UC Berkeley, in their review process when I worked there, as far as identifying and determining how they’re being holistically looked at. So, we have academics, extracurriculars, and communication. So, academics is probably the first pillar as far as what is important in the admissions process. That’s going to be your GPA. It’s going to be your test scores. It’s going to be anything that you’ve done that showcases your academic interests. Extracurriculars are everything you do outside the classroom, right? Any ways that you show your passions, your interests, your commitments, your progression, responsibility, leadership, all these kinds of fun adjectives that kind of falls into extracurriculars.

And then communication, which is writing and speaking. Writing though, especially, as we all know in the application process, you’re going to have a lot of essays to be writing. So, when thinking of these three features of the college admissions process, research is fitting in all three of these. And that’s the biggest reason why research is so important in the college admissions process is that it’s like the one superpower you can have in your application that’s really showcasing a lot of different avenues for you. So first off, academics, it’s pretty obvious. Your research paper is showing your major interests, it’s showing your intellectual curiosity. That is one specific measure that UC Berkeley uses in their admissions review is do they have intellectual curiosity? Have they pursued a subject of interest or a topic of interest, a thematic area of interest, outside of their transcript and their scripted classes and tests that they have to take?

That is essential to be having. You need to have that sort of spike in that narrative of what you want to be researching. What problems are interesting to you, what topics are things that you want to explore, and that’s going to very much fit in this academic bucket in the holistic review process. Research is just going to really drive that home. As far as extracurriculars, it is an extracurricular. Research is absolutely an extracurricular and it fits all those things I just talked about with the academics piece. But it also shows just a lot of values of you as an applicant. A big one is independence. You’re not required to do research unless you’re doing the IB curriculum and then you have the extended essay, or if you’re doing A levels, then you’re going to potentially have an EPQ, but we’ll talk about that later on. But for the most part, extracurriculars are showing its independence, but through the research project because no one’s forcing you or making you do this.

So, the fact that you have research is just going to look like you’re a very responsible, mature applicant and student that’s really serious about what they want to study. It shows commitment. Research is a long process. It’s not just simply writing a paper. You are doing a ton of actual research to determine how you’re doing the paper. What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve? What’s the additional literature of people who’ve already been trying to solve this problem? So, the commitment is going to be showcased a lot in this extracurricular. Sustainability as well too, that you’ve been doing something focused on a particular project for a while, seeing it from the start to the end. It’s a really great attribute to be sharing in your application. And then progression; that you went from maybe a Coursera course on introduction to environmental science to now you have maybe even gotten published in a high school journal about your analysis of currents, environmental practices in California and how they’re dealing with solar panel public policy laws.

So, you’ve taken this small idea of an extracurricular and you’ve progressed it all the way to this accumulating research paper. That ability to show in your extracurriculars through a research program is really, really powerful. And then of course, research is showing your writing aptitude, right? It’s a great way to show that you’re actually good at writing, that you have an ability to write at a collegiate level. There are some universities where you can even share abstracts or full papers. MIT is really famous for having a research maker’s portfolio where it’s a whole separate supplemental application in the undergraduate process where you showcase all your research. It’s a great way to add a letter of recommendation to your profile if you had a research mentor or professor that was helping you in this process. So, research is just one of those really key things when we get a grade 9 or grade 10 student in Prepory saying like, “This is a great thing to be starting. Starting a research project in some shape or form just because it’s going to showcase and hit all these boxes that are so essential, fall in your senior year when you’re applying.”

Okay, so kind of doing a deep dive into this, right? We’ve kind of seen how it fits into these three boxes. So, I’m going to kind of go a bit quicker in this, and of course I will use research as my evidence to argue why these claims are appropriate. You can check out the URLs, we’ll make sure you get those. But first one is developing intellectual curiosity. The idea that high school students, by doing their own custom independent-led research, they developed a curiosity and an actual motivation to do an academic study. So, there’s a lot of research out there that shows by doing a research project actually has sort of indirect benefits to the rest of your coursework, that it allows you to become more focused, and you have better time management skills. So, it really does drive home this intellectual curiosity. It’s creating that purpose and major fit, which I talked about in the last slide, but again, research was shown in high school research that it was preparing students for early careers in science and particularly for women and people of color.

And so again, this is a great thing to be able to be doing is preparing for your major kind of getting an idea like—and I actually do biological research—”Am I wanting to put on a white lab coat and be in a wet lab and actually take samples and specimens? Is that of interest to me?” And there’s research out there that says if you do that in high school, it’s going to really help you for a career afterwards in sciences. The third one is demonstrating creativity and independence. So, this was looking on the idea of career readiness specifically, and how undergraduate research and research in general connects to career readiness. Really driving home the idea of independence.

So, kind of what I was talking about, right? That research, especially you doing your own research is sort of forcing you to create your own schedule to manage your time more effectively, to find different ways to supplement the rest of your coursework that you’re doing because you have this side project that’s starting to take up more time, you become more aware of your own free time, which forces you to sort of decide how to block your time, how to use your time in a strategic way. Build grit and resilience. So, there’s a lot of research on thereof, kind of where grit comes from, where resilience comes from, when it comes to high school students and preparing for university. Rigorous academic work. So, taking advanced coursework, APs, dual enrollment, and special independent projects like a research program are seen as statistically proven to help develop this sort of resilience.

You absolutely need this when doing research because as I experience almost on a weekly basis, I get told by my mentors, no, this is not a good research topic or you’re missing the wrong methods or you need to go back and read this, this, and this. You’ll constantly be rejected in a lot of ways, which is also good for the application process, but learning how to be resilient and that grit is going to be really important once you get to college. But showcasing that in the application is just going to look really attractive to universities. Another one that’s just kind of is straightforward, right? Research shows branding and prestige. If you had a really great professor that you worked with because you got into a really good program, or if you got published in a specific journal or if you were a first author in a journal, that stuff is going to look really attractive on your application.

They’re easy honors to be listing in your application. Again, you can have a supplemental letter of recommendation from the person that helped you with the research. There are certain programs out there, like the RSI like Pioneer Academics, that are sort of green flags to admission officers of your ability to be triggered because—and think of it—what the university has seen is that you’ve already been accepted into a prestigious program and found success in it, so it’s a great flag to them of like, “Oh, they’re already sort of qualified.” That’s why Harvard grads get into McKinsey right away because they already have that brand. So, if you are able to find that in high school through a research opportunity, it’s just going to make this application a lot easier for you. And then there’s a lot of research on this.

What I shared here actually wasn’t implemented in California high schools in 2017 and 2018 was this idea of how to improve college readiness. And one of the key things in there was about developing independent research projects or independent academic interest projects. So it could be, which I’ll talk about of what research is in a little bit, but it was spanning this idea that as long as it’s some sort of initiative that you’ve taken to learn about a particular topic or a particular issue outside of your normal coursework, outside of your normal homework, that shows readiness for college students. Because think of it, when you go to college, you’ll constantly have to do things that are not written in the curriculum, that are not in the syllabus, that are not explicitly stated the things that you have to be doing, but you have to do those extra individual things to be successful in college and to graduate from college and to get a good job after college. And so doing research like this is really important in high school because it’s driving home those skills and those understandings of finding your own independent work. You don’t have a teacher telling you, “Hey, this is due on Wednesday. You have to be doing this.” This is on you, bud. And so, by adding this experience and doing research, it’s going to build those skills and be really valuable for you.

SAM: So I was talking about this and leading into it, into the California study, but what does actually count as research? So, any sort of academic or class related projects. Absolutely, if you have done AP Capstone or the IB extended essay or even a thoroughly assigned project in AP U.S. History or some other course, that can be a research project. Depending on the strategy of your application and what else you have going on and your Prepory coach and how they’re helping you build on those opportunities and communicate in your application, it can be a specific activity that you list in your application, this particular research project, even though it was done in one of your academic courses. So, what’s really, I would say this is sort of a minimum expectation where this is great to have, but to kind of take that higher level with one of these projects.

This is kind of the start of the research, and this is where you’re working with a Prepory coach to help you understand that next step of research, right? Now you’ve done a literature review for AP Capstone, so you’re looking at the literature and you cold emailed a couple professors and now you are an RA on a PhD student summer project for research. And that progression of research where you’ve taken your original topic and now, you’re doing additional research in a deeper area is just really attractive in the application and for your college readiness in general. So, class-related projects that have some sort of research are great things that count as research. Independent projects. So, there are many different kinds of organizations out there. It’s a lot of very prestigious ones. I would say Pioneer is sort of the third-party leader in this space of providing research project opportunities where you get mentored with a professor or a PhD student or a PhD candidate and you do either a one-on-one or a one-on-four sort of experience of getting mentored or writing a research paper.

A lot of organizations have different lenses and niches about what that research paper looks like and what the outcomes are, and it also depends on what subjects you’re interested in and everything like this, but these can be really valuable projects just because they help give you the tools and a scaffolding and a schedule to create these research papers. I will say that the best projects in the eyes of admission officers are going to be ones that you are doing on your own or that you’ve connected with a professor organically in some sort of way. But I would say like a Pioneer, like a Lumiere, I have a soft spot for them, I think they’re a great organization. They do some really cool stuff. These sorts of opportunities can help you get started for a research paper. What’s important though is you’re applying for these; these are competitive programs to get into where you have to write essays to get into these programs.

You have to kind of prepare for potential interviews that might come up. So again, being able to be coached and ready to get into these research programs is going to be really important for you. There are also pre-college programs, so these are not hosted by third party organizations, they’re hosted by universities. I’ve kind of been mentioning the RSI program at MIT quite a bit just because it is sort of the pinnacle of pre-college programs for research. Boston University has a program called RISE that is excellent. UC Santa Barbara has a program that’s very good. Texas Tech has the Clark Scholars program, which I think there’s only like 12 students every year that gets selected into it. If you get into one of those programs, you’re set, you’re in a great place for the application. But there are also ones in between. There’s a really cool program at George Mason where you get to do wet lab research. It’s specific for biological research. That’s really cool, it’s on site. You get to live on campus.

So, there are a lot of pre-college programs that happen usually in the summer, and that’s what Daniel and I were talking about at the beginning is like, these applications are opening now. A lot of us are juggling our grade 12 and grade 11 and 10 because the grades 11 and 10 kind of have to get started now honestly, of researching which ones they want to apply for and then actually doing the applications come November and December. You have to get transcripts, letters of recommendation, essays put together, an activity list, prepare for like—it’s kind of a mini university application. So, it is kind of timely. It’s almost like we thought of this to do this presentation for tonight and to kind of do this now because it is kind of the season and the timing to be thinking about this. So, class related projects, independent projects, pre-college programs, research assistant roles. I kind of have been saying this role on and off.

I have had student experiences where they’ve cold emailed professors or master’s and PhD students and asked to join their research. They read one of their papers that were published, they sent them a cold email, and asked if they’re doing anything this summer. Yes, that actually can work. I’ve seen it happen many times. I have one senior student who tried to do that this summer and it struck out; he sent probably a little over 20 emails to different professors. Luckily, he ended up doing his own research through one of his high school projects, so he still had a research opportunity and he had fantastic grades and background and everything like this. So, it is difficult to do, but again, that’s kind of why you’re working with a coach because if it doesn’t work out, you can think of other ways or how to craft the email or which professors to even reach out to, but that is something definitely that can happen.

Purely independent projects. So, I’ve talked about this as well too, but this is where it’s really just done by yourself. So, I’ve had students do just independent literature reviews about a particular topic. I have a student that’s applying this fall that he basically just put together a quick literature review. He ended up using it for one of his classes in grade 11. He did this summer going into grade 11, and then he used it for one of his grade 11 classes, his microeconomics class. He did a literature review on the industries that are commonly used by first generation Americans, so the idea of immigrant or first-generation business owners and what industries are they commonly in. And so, he did a full literature analysis of where and what that looks like. But you can do a lot of other things too, and many of you kind indirectly do research or you aren’t absentmindedly doing research is maybe a good way to think of it where doing interviews to get your—like if you’re on student council let’s say, and you’re doing a bunch of interviews or surveys with the students about their opinions of the school cafeteria food because you’re trying to initiate a new program to get new food into your school, it’s research.

And so, I know you probably are not writing a full-on research paper on this topic, but if you do something like this and you have that data, definitely we can help you figure out how to make that into an actual research paper. And that can be a really cool thing where you have organic primary research that you’ve been collecting for one thing, but then being able to do it in a different project. And then there’s a lot of community-based or virtual research projects. So, market research on farmer markets, social media trends, that is very specific. That one’s clearly a topic one of my students did. But there’s also a lot of online research projects that you can get a part of, so you don’t have to do these pre-college programs. You can have some online virtual research projects that work out as well, too.

So, research is quite broad as far as what counts as research. What’s important is that you’re kind of crafting your particular story to communicate how this fits a research angle, like what you were actually researching, what was the problem statement about it, what were your findings or outcomes because of your research. There are different ways to brand and show this is the end results and this is what I learned, and then learning how to communicate that then in your application. So, a lot of cool stuff here about research. Again, what counts as research, why research is important, how it shows up in the application process.

With that being said, though, we’re going to move forward on how to actually find these opportunities. We just talked about the ideas of what these opportunities look like. Now, we’re going to talk about how we find credible opportunities. But first I want to take a much-needed break. I need to drink some water, and I’ll let Daniel take this next slide and talk about Rory and a little bit about Prepory.

DANIEL: Yeah, awesome. Thank you, Sam. I think I actually want to address something that came up in the chat as well since I’m here. I think one of the parents that were in the chat asked if “what we do essentially helps students land research programs and is that sort of our area of expertise?” Just in case this is maybe someone’s first time discovering Prepory, they don’t know a ton about us, we are a college admissions counseling firm. We work with high school students from 9th grade and even transfer applicants and graduate applicants through PhD and master’s degree process, through every aspect of preparing their profile, developing a winning profile from 9th and 10th grade and eventually in 11th and 12th grade putting together a winning college application. And because research can be a really great way to stand out in the college admissions process, we also help high school students get research programs or land research opportunities, whether that’s the story that Sam just shared, that one of his students from last admission cycle, he worked with him to put together cold emails to land a research opportunity with a local professor or through really competitive applications that we help our students develop for programs like MIT RSI or Georgia Tech Research Institute internship and all of the other programs that we’ve been talking about on this conversation.

So, in short, we’re college admissions, counseling and helping students get research is a thing that we do, not all of what we do. And on Rory, just in case anyone is in the audience, and they’re really interested in AI, we’re really proud of this tool. So, we built an AI powered college admissions assistant and we are the only college admissions counseling company, I think in the globe, whose primary business is working with students in the college admissions process. And so, it’s not like this tool was built by folks who all they are software engineers and software experts, but for us, this was built by our counselors who are also software engineers and software experts. And so, if anyone’s sort of into AI and likes using this as a resource, this is certainly a really great starting place for helping you think about how you can maybe land research opportunities or sort of think about any aspect of a college admissions process. And I shared that with you all in the chat. It’s also on our website if you want to take a look.

SAM: Fantastic. So, I’m going to keep coming on here. So again, just as the recap talked about the importance of research and the college admissions process, defining those different ways that research is seen by the admission officers, talking about what is research and how it’s defined in different ways and then how you can communicate it, we’ll even go more into that a little later, but now we’re going to kind of go to this how to find the opportunities. And as Daniel was mentioning, as a coach, this is part of your responsibility to help your students: is build up profiles and give them ideas about different things to explore and different areas of interest, and one of them can certainly be helping to land some of these research opportunities. So, as I’ve kind of mentioned, there’s hosted programs and pre-college activities. A lot of them you can find online, a lot of them you could probably ask Rory about.

I’m sure Rory would give a great answer. They vary from just truly pay-to-play programs to incredibly competitive programs. I’ll talk a little bit about this just because I know that’s a common thread, I see on Reddit threads and stuff like this is like, “Should I do this program? Does it look bad because it’s pay-to-play?” These kinds of ideas. And it’s a complicated answer. I would say that any experience is good experience and so it’s going to teach you whatever program you do and doing research itself is going to teach you kind of the fundamentals of research and help you, again, talk about all those things I was mentioning as far as what’s good for admission officers in the application process and what kind of can showcase these different things about you. There are certainly times where you, pursuing these opportunities, want to try to get into the more prestigious programs, right?

They’re prestigious for a reason, they just have stronger resources, they have a stronger program if they are free or a really reduced rate, admission officers are very aware of that, which also shows your competitiveness because three programs are going to be more competitive. So, aiming for those is important and truly we have you mean, dream, target, and safety research programs that we’ll do with students to help them understand and hedge their vets a little bit. But is pay-to-play inherently bad? There are debating ideas on this even within the Prepory team. I would say just overall, the research opportunity is going to be very helpful to have. Mainly because, how do I say this, I think what’s really important and valuable about it is even though it’s pay-to-play, it’s still this experience that you’ve been having that shows your interests, your ability to find academics that are interesting to you, to again, show independence and all these places.

And yes, it is pay-to-play and there are some negative connotations sometimes to that, but overall, it’s going to be a great experience for you and being able to communicate that in your essays and your activity list is still going to be really valuable. So, every applicant is kind of different. We would approach working with you and your students to figure out what’s going to be best for you in general, but truly just being able to take advantage of these opportunities is going to be worth it. So that’s hosted programs, pre-college programs. There’s also a lot of opportunities through your high school. So again, as I mentioned, either through a class or advised by one of your teachers or put out of a club or activity on campus, there’s going to be many ways within your high school where you can get some more opportunities to pursue research.

And I was kind of mentioning specific classes like the IB extended essay or the AP Capstone. Those are built in research opportunities that you can then grow off of. And then lastly, to find opportunities, local college and university opportunities. So, as I was saying, the cold research piece of it, sometimes they post different research opportunities either with graduate students or professors, but there’s research opportunities all over, as far as just to get involved and get started with this, is a matter of knowing when to start. And as we mentioned, I’ll say this for the third time, a lot of these are starting to open up. So, it is useful to get a plan together and figure out what this is going to look like. Continuing in other places. I have talked about the idea of cold emailing and where to find that literature. So, a lot of the time, getting a reference or a bibliography list you’ve created for another class and reaching out to those contacts, that’s going to be really helpful.

So, if it’s LinkedIn or if it’s email, even a phone call, that can look really good as far as trying to land those particular research opportunities, and then creating your own. So that is a cool passion project idea where, again, you can decide to pursue your own research ideas. You can find ways to publish it if it’s a traditional academic journal that you’re publishing in or if it’s a substack or medium or some sort of blog. And ultimately with Prepory, what we’re trying to do is help you figure out which pursuit and which type of research opportunity is going to be best for you.

SAM: So let’s say now that you’ve landed some of these research opportunities, right? So how do we showcase that in the actual applications? Because this is going to be just an important part. This is actually the evidence of what you’ve been doing. So, showing research in the application. The first one is just going to be the essays. That’s an obvious starting point. There are specific essays, like UI, a UC, one of their essays is to “Tell them about a particular extracurricular that you’ve done in the past three or four years that’s really made you really prepared for your major.” So that’s a clear essay opportunity. “Why major” essays, this is a great thing as well, too. These are going to be really important, and essays are just kind of a great platform to do that.

The activities list, so you can mention your role and the methods and the outcomes. You can share in your honors, the awards that you got because of this research. This allows you to be specific, be even nerdy a little bit. You can name drop specific, you know, if you use RSQL or statistical software or use some sort of biological research methodology, that’s all going to be really helpful as well. So, being specific in the activity list and sharing it there is a great place to showcase your research. Recommendation letters, so I had mentioned like having your mentor write a letter or if you’re a counselor talks about it in the counselor letter or a teacher talks about in the teacher recommendation letter, that’s going to be really valuable as well. Interviews, so you may have an interview opportunity where that’s definitely something you want to bring up, right? Research you’ve done and kind of the academic interest behind the research and how that’s developed into your profile and who you are. And then supplemental materials. You can usually upload some sort of resume and that resume can have an abstract or showcase your research a little bit. MIT, again, has a research application you can fill out. Sometimes you can upload posters, you can upload full research papers to certain schools. So, if you do all five of these, that’s awesome, right? Doing it thoughtfully is important, but that can happen, especially if research was a really big deal in your application kind of preparation process, but there’s clear areas to be talking about the research opportunities you’ve been doing.

The last thing that I’ll talk about with research is common pitfalls. So, what we don’t want to do is research just to check a box and what we mean by that is to just, that’s one of the things I get all the time, “Are you supposed to do volunteering to prepare for the college application?” The answer is not necessarily, it definitely looks good. Research is kind of the same idea. We don’t want to do it just to check a box. We want to be doing it because we are thoughtfully engaged with it, that it was worth our time, it was a good commitment, it was valuable. So, it’s really important that we’re doing research just more than just to check a box because if it is just to check a box, then it’s probably not going to be good research and you’re probably going to really struggle with it.

And if you really struggle with the research, it might seep into your other academic areas. So, we really want to avoid doing it just to check a box, but instead, doing meaningful research that’s important. Another thing is to avoid overly technical jargon in the essays. So, I had talked about in the activity list, being nerdy and technical is good. That’s fine in the activity list just because it’s short, it’s not very long and they’re going to see it and they’ll be like, “Oh, okay, that’s a real research that looks like what they’re talking about.” Or even better, if your admission officer studied that in college as well, too or is aware of that research, they can identify it with it really, right? In essays, there’s a handful of them where there’s an exception, but mostly we want to avoid technical jargon because the idea is you’re communicating with a real person.

One of my colleagues, James, always says that essays should pass the coffee shop test. This idea that if you were talking to a random person or somebody in your circle about what you were doing, specifically research in this area, that they would be aware of what the field is and importance and being able to not dumb it down, that’s not the right way to put it, but put it into context for them to understand. Don’t exaggerate your role. Authenticity is really important here. We’re not expecting you to have published journals and science today or anything really noteworthy, but just being clear of what you’ve actually done is important. It’s kind of like a general rule of thumb for all the activities is to not exaggerate your role. But I would say especially for research, just because you want to be clear about what it is you are actually doing, and it just will allow you to make sure to talk about it in an honest way, in a very straightforward way.

Then lastly, and this can be applied in a lot of different ways, but especially for research, you really should focus on research that matters to you, that captures your interests, that captures your major academic direction that you want to be going down simply because you’re going to be spending a lot of time with this, and so it’s worthwhile to do it on things you like, right? You shouldn’t just pick up soccer because you think that’s going to look good on an application. You should be doing soccer and putting all that time into practice and doing a good job because you enjoy the sport. Research is the exact same way. You shouldn’t be trying to fake it, you shouldn’t be trying to just check the box, as we said. And it does take a little bit of effort and reflection to figure out what is actually mattering to you. But once you do figure that out, it’s really important to move forward with that. So, with that being said, I think Daniel, I’m going to pass it to you and talk a little bit more about Prepory, but I guess, did you want to bring up anything, Daniel? I was kind of just zooming along there on everything, but yeah, what did you think?

DANIEL: Yeah, no, I thought it was great. I appreciate that, Sam. There is something I sort of wanted to bring up and I think it’s, well, a few things. First, we’ve gotten some questions around non-STEM oriented research interest, and while I think research is maybe most important for STEM applicants and definitely for pre-med applicants, it’s not something that should be exclusively done by STEM applicants. So, if you’re in the audience and your child’s interested in business or the humanities are just generally not engineering, not anything in the computer science or pre-med world, research can and still will be really helpful in making them a more competitive college admissions applicant. We’ve also gotten a lot of questions around “What specifically should my child do as a research project?” or “What research opportunities would you recommend for them?” I think my response to that, it’s going to be really hard for us to address that in this sort of conversation just because we want to learn about your kid.

I think what Sam said just a moment ago around authenticity in this process and hopefully using research as a way to solidify a major interest can be really helpful. And so, we’ll want to learn about your kid, their academic interests, their career interests, their overall profile so that we can make specific recommendations around what research opportunities or competitive summer programs would be a really good fit for them. And so, the best way for us to do that is if you guys scheduled an initial consultation with our team, we’ll be dropping the link for this towards the end of our call and I’ll go ahead and drop it now. But if you’re sitting in the audience and you’re feeling like, “Man, this is really helpful, but I just want to know how this applies to my students specifically,” or “I’d really love to sort of get a sense of what kind of programs my kids should be applying to.” You can schedule an initial consultation with our team sometime this week or early next week so that our Enrollment Managers can really get to know your family, get to know your student, their profile, and then make specific recommendations for what programs they should be applying for and also walk you through how we support them, not just on this aspect of the college admissions process, but really end to end on every aspect of applying to college.

DANIEL: I think with that, Sam, you can go ahead. Since it sounds like this is the first time that some people maybe heard about Prepory, we want to share a little bit about what we do and how we help students. So, our programs are customized to students in terms of what grade level they’re in. There’s slight variation for the kind of work that we do with a 9th grade student because they’re not actively applying to college when they’re 9th grade, of course, and the kind of work that we do with a freshman, I mean, excuse me, with an 11th grade student.

But generally speaking, all of our programs include hour long, one-on-one advising sessions. With our 9th and 10th graders, what we’re really focused on is helping them at this time of the year land really great research opportunities or get admitted to competitive summer programs that will make them stronger applicants in this process. Developing winning extracurricular profiles, sort of really illustrating an academic and career interest that can make them a more competitive applicant in this process. And by the time we’re sort of in the 11th and 12th grade, actively applying, writing essays, putting together resumes, activities list, and the honors and awards section. Every student that’s working with Prepory has a dedicated college admissions coach. Sam shared a few stories earlier today on some of his students. He has a pretty small cohort of students that he works with at this stage one-on-one to navigate every aspect of the college admissions process.

Our programs also include parent check-ins. These are separate calls for just parents. So, you guys can stay in the loop of the process. This might be your first kid going to college or maybe you didn’t go to college in this country, or you haven’t gone to college in 20 years, so you just don’t know a lot about the admissions process today. This is a way to keep you in the loop of your child’s progress and make sure that sort of everything that’s going on without making dinner table conversation about, “Hey, what’s your essay about?” Because it’s probably not fun for your kid and definitely not fun for you. Our programs also include Mock Committee Review style application reviews, where a team of third-party coaches who aren’t working with your kid directly, who have admissions experience at places like Berkeley, San Diego, Syracuse, Vanderbilt, Purdue, NYU Columbia, analyzing your entire kid’s profile.

One thing I want to say about this that’s really unique is that Prepory is the only admissions consultancy who includes Mock Admissions Committee Reviews, not only in 12th grade, but rather every year of high school. Of course for 9th and 10th grade students, they’re kind of mini reviews where we’re not looking at real college applications, but we’re looking to see sort of how has your admissions profile developed since you first enrolled, and so that we’re not just relying on that one coach who’s working with you, but rather, our entire team here with 500 plus years of experience to sort of crowdsource our brain trust to make your kid the best applicant they can be. And finally, our programs will include unlimited essay reviews, for freshmen and sophomores, primarily competitive summer applications, competitive research programs, that like Sam said, require essays, they require interview prep, they require letters of recommendation, so you really want to support them on how to apply and get these research programs that can be really competitive. Clark Scholars, Texas Tech, like Sam said, sometimes admits 12 students. They’re really selective programs.

SAM: Alright.

DANIEL: We’re going to go ahead and open up our Q&A again, if anyone is sitting in the audience—and what Sam said today I think was really helpful, so Sam, we really appreciate and thank you so much for co-leading this with me tonight—but you want to learn more about Prepory, how we can help your kid through the college admissions process and land research opportunities, you can go ahead and scan that QR code or you can go ahead and, excuse me, go to prepory.com/book-now to book your initial consultation with our team. I see that someone’s hand is raised, so if you just want to go ahead and submit your question in written form and then we’ll address that live, we can go ahead and do that. But for everyone who’s here to schedule your initial consultation, go ahead and go to that link or scan the QR code. Sam and I will be hanging around to answer any live questions, but this brings us to the end of our webinar. Thank you guys so much. We’ll be here for the next 10 or so minutes.

SAM: Okay. And before we jump into this question, Daniel, I just want to answer general questions that are coming through is this idea of like, “I’m interested in X, what should I be doing?” And so, the beauty of this, especially research as a high school student, is you can do a lot of different kinds of research. You’re not limited to like, “I’m doing biology, so I have to do biological research.” You can take a different lens or a different focus to it. So, I was talking about how you could talk about the policy of state research in Florida on wildlife animals in the past 10 years and kind of do an analysis of what that protection policy looks like. It’s still very much related to biology and could be even more related to your area of interest in that regard. So, there are a lot of different approaches you can take to research. We understand you can’t always on your own get in a wet lab and do biological research. So, there are kinds of creative approaches to this whole process.

Dana asked, “What would you suggest for an 8th grader to do over the summer going into 9th grade?” A big thing of that particular age is just building any type of interest. So, if it’s free courses on Coursera just to learn about what is environmental science, what is international relations, then those things are going to be really powerful. If they’re up for a research project, maybe that will make sense. I would imagine they would have to have some background already in an area of interest and have a plan put together, it’d also be a very motivated rising 9th grader, but it can certainly happen. But I think just getting exposed to different academic areas is going to be what’s really important and getting them excited about school and learning and future directions of high school. And of course, in addition, there’s whichever things they usually would participate in beyond academics for the summer of sports and sleep away camp. At that age, you are quite flexible. It’s just important to start slowly introducing the idea of independent academic learning and looking into those different areas. I’ll just keep going and read them out loud and answer that. Does that sound okay for you?

DANIEL: Sounds great.

SAM: So the next one is, “When do you recommend students to do research versus an internship versus doing something else over the summer?” That’s very contextual and we have this nice QR code for you to book a consultation, and that would be something that you could bring up and how a Prepory coach can help you figure that out. It really does recommend on your age and what you’ve already been doing and what opportunities are available to you in the first place, where you’re located, there are a lot of various ways to answer this. There’s a strategy of trying to do a variety of things. So, having one internship and one research and then one or two particular clubs that you’re doing, right? There’s also a strategy on sort of doubling down. So, you have three different research opportunities because you love research, or you’ve been able to have a full job that you’ve been working in the summers and then two internships, and that can work as well, too.

It really depends on the student profile and the story and what they’re trying to showcase as far as which things they should be doing at which times. For the context of today and today’s presentation, I would say for doing research, starting pretty young is challenging to do. I see probably good research projects this summer going into 11th grade, so going from 10th grade to 11th grade, and then especially going from 11th to 12th grade. Not to say you can’t do research earlier than that, but it’s sort of a good measure to think about or a good goal to be thinking about.

“Does founding a nonprofit on the lines of a passion project and a similar research topic, elevate the portfolio?” With a quick “hello” thrown in there. Hello to you too. So, the easy answer is yes, right? The idea that maybe you did a research project on something, so maybe you did a research project on maybe you wanted to evaluate for your student body, which sort of humanitarian issue they’re most passionate about recently, right? What’s their top three things or issues in their community that they want to address? And so, you gathered all that data and that information and after doing analysis of what everybody was saying, you decided and figured out it was a particular, maybe it was a women’s shelter and need for women’s protection and abusive situations. And so, you then decided to create a nonprofit that helped high school students connect with local women’s shelters and provide fundraising or support or whatever you might be. That would be an example of you taking your research and kind of making that into a passion project. That definitely can happen. That’s a great sort of outcome of your research and there’s a thread in that as far as your essay and activity list. So absolutely. And there’s a creative way to keep going about that. So no, I like that.

“What kind of research do you advise for school students given limitations with human blood, rats or mice?” Yes, those are limited. I hope you’re not just getting human blood. So, what I would say is the idea that research, and kind of what I was talking about, is what defines research. Research is so broad as far as what that looks like. It doesn’t have to be what I would call a wet lab. This idea that you’re working with hazardous materials, and you have to do cleaning and you have compounds in the air and things like this. It doesn’t have to be a wet lab in order for it to count as research. So, what I would say is this: if you can’t access those things, then focusing on either secondary research for sciences is really important, so you can do research on other people’s research. This idea where you’re gathering a bunch of, let’s say you wanted to research the biological processes of dissecting animals in the post COVID era. So, then you can look at from research of the past four or five years, what biological processes have been happening as far as new theories or new approaches to dissecting animals and creating a synthesis of literature on that background. That would be research where you’re not actually in the lab doing research yourself, but you’re doing secondary research on what is going on in the field and creating the synthesis of it. So that is a good answer.

“Do you have a lab to do in silico validation and digital computer modeling tools?” I’m assuming you’re asking if you have to have a lab to do those things. So, kind of similar to my last response is this idea that certainly if you have those opportunities available, you can pursue them, but if you don’t, there’s definitely ways to work around it to create your own research and find different resources or tools to help you create those opportunities for yourself. Great.

DANIEL: I’m addressing the one that we have right now, as well.

SAM: Great. I’ll let you, Daniel, take that question as well, too. But just for the folks that are still in here, if you’re thinking of more questions, please type them in. I’m happy to talk about them with research. I think ultimately when it comes down to preparing for college, what you’re trying to do is showcase the best version of yourself, the best interests that you have and the different things that are important to you. And research is just one of those, it’s definitely not easy, but comprehensive ways to do those things. It’s certainly not the only thing. So, if you’ve kind of come away from this presentation thinking like, “Woah, research seems way too much. I’m not even there yet. I can’t even really conceptualize what doing my own research would look like.” I would say two things: one is, working with a mentor or coach or a teacher to prepare for research will help you get there. And so, everybody in my eyes is capable of doing research in some certain way. So, it will come. But two, if research is in your jam, again, don’t check the box. There are other things you can be doing like founding the nonprofit that was mentioned earlier, doing extracurriculars, doing internships. Research is not the end all be all. You’re not required to have this thing by any means. But I hope if you learned anything from tonight’s presentation, it is that it is quite helpful, comprehensive, and very flexible in a lot of ways.

“What kinds of venues for publishing research are still valued for applications?” So, I’m assuming you mean sort of where to do publications or show your research in different areas that actually look good to universities and actually valuable. And there are a couple ways to do this. One is, yes, you should have some sort of platform where you are actually are showcasing your research. So, traditionally that comes in an academic journal that you’d find on Google Scholar or JSTOR or those big academic search journals. There are high school specific journals for that, and there are a lot of ways to prepare that application to be reviewed.

Probably the most notorious one is the Conrad, which is for history research in particular. It’s really hard to get into that journal, but that would be one kind of traditional way. The other one would be sort of just like social media and popular platforms, so having a Substack, have a Medium account. I’ve even seen cool research done, especially by my business and marketing students, where they showcase it in sort of an Instagram slide of different statistics and things like this. This gets influences and mentions. Again, research is very broad. There are a lot of ways to define what research can actually be like, so that can be one way. If you were able to do the research for a competition or posters, presentations, that’s a great way to, a venue to showcase your research, and then if it’s not in your coursework, outside of that—and again, I do recommend you do it in some way—but outside of that would be just simply having the letter of recommendation from whoever helped you do the research, be able to vouch for your research.

DANIEL: I think with that, Sam, we’ve got this one last question. Maybe let’s answer this one if anyone has any questions, now, what’s sort of be your last opportunity to drop that question. I’m getting a lot of questions around our programming, how it’s structured, how we work with 9th grade students compared to some other grade levels. If you guys just want to learn more about our program and sort of how we support students through the college admissions process, the best thing that you can do is use that link that I’ve dropped in our chat to schedule that initial consultation with our team. I do want to address one question that came up right now on our chat regarding our services, we don’t offer any a la carte services, any sort of a la carte support. The college admissions process, like Sam said, it’s a really holistic process. So if we’re only working with you on your essays or only working with you to land a research program, it’s insufficient because they’re looking at every aspect of you: your extracurriculars, your essays, how you fit for a school, your transcripts, and so it’s why our programming is really comprehensive and we don’t offer any sort of a la carte advising or a la carte support.

Alright. I think with that, we’ve sort of gotten through all of our questions on the Q&A. I want to say thank you so much to everyone that joined us this evening. We had an absolutely wonderful time walking you guys through. I’ll go ahead and answer this last question in a second, but I’m walking you guys through how to navigate competitive research opportunities. Sam, thank you so much as well for sharing your Tuesday evening and just your knowledge and experience around this and with us. We had a great time. For anyone who’s here, if you want to get a sense of how coaches like Sam helped their students with the college admissions process, you can go ahead and schedule your initial consultation using our link prepory.com/book-now or scanning that QR code. For the last question in our chat, it’s around our price range. So, it depends on what grade level your high school student is in. For 9th grade, our fees are $4,900 per student, for 10th grade it’s $5,900 per student, and for 11th grade it will be anywhere from $10,900 to $12,900. Depending on your high school student’s grade level, through an initial consultation, our team will be able to walk you through exactly what’s included and how our programs are structured here at Prepory. Thank you guys so much for joining us tonight and it was really wonderful meeting you all. Hope you guys have a wonderful evening, Sam. Thank you again for tonight.

SAM: Thank you.

DANIEL: Bye guys.