For a 17-year-old, Randy Collado has landed a pretty sweet part-time job: Since last summer, the high-school senior has been working on academic research in the lab of a Columbia University neuroscientist.
Through a program called Brain Research Apprenticeships in New York at Columbia, or Brainyac, Mr. Collado was one of 16 high-school students who participated in a six-week apprenticeship last summer at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, which specializes in neuroscience. Working in the lab of Ning Qian, Mr. Collado so impressed his supervisor with his analysis of how autistic and typical brains function differently that the high-school student was offered an additional three-month assignment as a temporary worker this fall.
After school, as friends disperse to sports, club meetings, or retail jobs, Mr. Collado heads to the Zuckerman Institute and uses specialized software to engage in the theoretical neuroscience for which Mr. Qian is known. The lab relies on math and computer models to assess brain function rather than dissecting brain material.
They draw underrepresented high-school women and minorities into rewarding careers. Federal and private grants help keep fees from being an obstacle. And colleges identify standout students for recruiting.
“I’d give away twice the time I’ve invested if it meant the same doors were opened to me,” says Mr. Collado, who identifies as Hispanic and African-American and lives in a northern Manhattan neighborhood where the median family income is barely half the national average. “I’m 17 and doing research at a major institution — that’s worth any sacrifice.”
This sort of arrangement — a high-school student working in an academic lab — is more common than you might think. A number of universities, including Baylor, Northeastern, Princeton, and Stanford, have created programs that allow high-school students to earn a stipend while working in scientists’ labs. The proliferation of such programs is driven in part by a National Science Foundation requirement that scientists seeking basic-research grants must also identify the “broader impacts” of their research; grant solicitors are increasingly pointing to high-school research programs, especially those focused on low-income and minority students, as evidence of broader impact.
Claire Duggan, director of programs and partnerships at Northeastern’s Center for STEM Education, says she works with researchers seeking grants and encourages them to build in support of the university’s Young Scholars Program. Each summer the program receives 250 to 300 applications from rising high-school seniors in the Boston area who want to work in Northeastern research labs. The students are placed in teams in the labs; in a typical summer, only 20 to 35 slots are available.
At most institutions, the high-school students pay little to no fee for the research programs. Northeastern charges a $150 commitment fee but also pays the students a $1,375 stipend, primarily to defray travel costs. The stipends are meant to open the research programs up to students from low-income families, and to encourage far more racial and socioeconomic diversity than in more-typical STEM summer camps.
“When you take a student from a downtown Boston high school and you pair them up with a student from a high-end suburban high school, they realize that they both deserve a seat at the table,” Ms. Duggan says. “That’s as big a component as the research that the students are doing.”
Stanford’s Office of Science Outreach also works with university researchers to help them fulfill the NSF’s “broader impacts” requirement. The university’s RISE program — Raising Interest in Science and Engineering — places 25 local high-school students in Stanford’s labs each summer.
The students, all of whom are from low-income families or have parents who didn’t go to college, work about 30 hours a week and receive a $2,500 stipend. At the end of the summer, at a reception for family and friends, the students share posters they’ve created outlining their research.
RISE receives many more qualified applicants than it can place in labs. It is not connected to Stanford’s admissions office, but many RISE alumni do apply for admission; about 10 percent of the 179 RISE alumni have enrolled at Stanford as undergraduates, says Maiken Bruhis, assistant director of the science-outreach office. Many others end up at similarly selective institutions.
“You need to have something on your résumé to get into competitive schools,” Ms. Bruhis says. “Having an experience like this is not just a résumé filler — it’s a high-quality experience, and that can make a difference.”
At some institutions, graduate students are the driving force in creating the high-school research programs. A decade ago, two graduate students in earth sciences at the University of Southern California created the Young Researchers Program, which is still run by graduate students today. The program had its biggest class last summer, when 15 local students, nearly all from low-income families, were paired up with Ph.D. candidates as mentors. Erin McParland, the program’s coordinator and a Ph.D. candidate in marine and environmental biology, says one of her favorite projects looked at the “science of itch”; a high-school student stimulated a mouse’s brain throughout the summer, observing what made the mouse itch.
Students in the program work 15 hours per week and also attend sessions about applying to college and seeking financial aid.
“At the beginning, a few of them can barely look you in the eye,” says Erin McParland, the program’s coordinator and a Ph.D. candidate in marine and environmental biology. “By the end of the summer, they’re able to explain all the science they’ve done really well. That confidence they gain really helps spur them on to get a four-year degree.”
The high-school research programs also provide the kind of direct experience that’s impossible to duplicate in school classrooms, says Richard Lipkin, a senior staff associate in Mr. Qian’s lab at Columbia, and Mr. Collado’s supervisor.
“The only way you learn science is by doing it,” he says, “and the only way to hone your skills is to work one on one with other people who are doing it.”
