At the end of the year, the top 100 UP masters of B station are freshly baked, among them, there is a "child of others" and a science and technology innovation master He classmate.
Who is He?
He is the top stream in the field of science and technology innovation in Station B, sitting on 9 million fans;
He always seems to be able to find inspiration from life, play electronic products to his job, and he is also a top master.
Many parents can't help but sigh after watching it, if their children can also make such a project, why worry about not entering a famous school.
Indeed, in recent years, not to mention social media, research research for young people studying abroad is also in full swing. Entering the laboratory to do projects has even become the "standard" for many children on the way to school. According to the 11th grade students of a well-known bilingual school in Shanghai, nearly half of their class is engaged in scientific research and social research, "as long as the academic performance is still good, they will try scientific research projects."
However, as youth research becomes more and more market-oriented, parents are beginning to feel a new round of anxiety:
- The laboratory is getting more and more cattle, the equipment is becoming more and more expensive, is the youth scientific research a new round of study abroad "arms race"? Can students of liberal arts and social sciences only sigh with joy?
- Entering high school is a matter of seconds, will time-consuming scientific research occupy the time of competitions and activities?
- Children are fickle, what if there is no interest in holding on to it in the middle?
These problems have put parents in a dilemma against 100,000 or even hundreds of thousands of teenagers.
In response to these problems, we invited an institution that has been working in the field of youth scientific research for many years - Youfang Education.
In the past two years, many students have actively participated in international high-gold competitions such as ISEF, STS, and Yau Chengtong Middle School Science Award after completing scientific research projects. In the past two years, Youfang has accumulated more than ten students who have advanced to ISEF Finalist, and in 2021, 22 students of the Qiu Award alone have advanced to the global semi-finals, of which 8 (including winning) have advanced to the finals.
Last year, a total of 5 students won the honorary award in the ISEF Global Finals! In the past two years, Youfang has accumulated more than ten students who have advanced to ISEF Finalist.
The most valuable thing is that Youfang has also helped a large number of zero-based "rookie players", discovered their own interests in the way of scientific research, and accurately positioned the direction of further education.
Next, let's follow the senior scientific research tutor Sabrina to see what is "useful youth research" through the cases of different students.
Sabrina Li
Partner of Youfang Research and Education
Master of Public Relations Integrated Media from Georgetown University;
Worked at Ketchum Triumph and WPP Ogilvy Pruss;
8 years of experience in international education, seniority planning, background improvement of the big coffee;
2020-2021 Lead students to win 100+ awards in international research competitions;
Train 15 students to advance to the ISEF Global Finals in two years;
In 2021, 12+ students will be admitted to Harvard, MIT, Stanford and other world-renowned universities
#01
At present, many high school students' scientific research topics are estimated to be incomprehensible to even the Admissions Officers of the Ivy League. Isn't the more obscure the subject, the more useful it is for further education? If not, what exactly do elite universities want to see from your research resume?
In fact, doing scientific research is equivalent to a "rehearsal" of university academic life, and famous schools want to see how likely you are to survive in this school. After all, the academic pressure of famous universities is notorious, just a few examples:
At the Fujian MIT, it is recognized that a student here can do two things at the same time in the 3S of Study( Study), Sleep (Sleep), and Social Activities( and if it accounts for three, it is "Superman".
Instead of the California Institute of Technology in the Ivy League, it is almost impossible for a student to complete all the homework, so "group learning" has become a school landscape, and the pressure on students has made the top 20% of students in a grade unable to complete their work.
In order to "survive" in such an environment, in addition to knowledge reserves, the more lasting driving force is two words - interest.
In the process of chatting with students, Sabrina teacher often gets answers such as "all is OK" and "nothing particularly liked", and even some children directly say that they are not interested.
Is it true? Or did you not realize it yourself? There may be two reasons that prevent them from discovering their interest:
First, my interest is "useless"
Is there really a distinction between "useful" and "useless" interest? In fact, it's just that our thinking is too solidified:
Many children like to play basketball, but how many children can really become athletes? Therefore, "can't make a name for itself" became the reason for this interest to be Passed.
But can you only play basketball and be an athlete? Around the "love to play basketball" can dig out a lot of interesting scientific research problems. For example, many children play the ball in general, but when they lift the sneakers, it is like a family treasure.
How are basketball shoes different from other sneakers? How does the sole design of basketball shoes ensure that the grip is just right? This involves physics, materials science, ergonomics, etc., and children who play basketball have a deeper understanding of the details and can often make "useful" scientific research results.
Teacher Sabrina said that even if the students just say "I like to sleep", there is a way to let the child find the topic of scientific research in it, because scientific research is not something curled up in the laboratory, it is inspired by life, through the magnifying glass of scientific research, can dig out the interest that has been ignored.
Second, my interest was not what my parents wanted
There are not only children, but also parents, and parents will more or less have presets about their children's future.
Sabrina was a student whose brother was doing cutting-edge research in brain science at MIT. Parents hope that their daughters can also follow the route of their brother and "smoothly meet" MIT with their brothers, so when they first arrived, they hoped that the teacher would be equipped with a teacher in the direction of brain science, but this is not what the child likes.
Teacher Sabrina saw her careful thinking and arranged for several different mentors to talk to her first, while she herself observed. She found that although the child did not talk much in the communication with the tutor, he would often ask a question: "Can you solve this with the now popular machine learning?" ”
It turned out that her real interest was in computers.
After clarifying this direction, Sabrina teacher rearranged several computer tutors for her, and this time after the conversation, the child came out and said directly to the mother: "Mom, if I can't do a project with this teacher, I won't do this scientific research." ”
Of course, compared with the child's naïve and spontaneous, parents sometimes think more carefully and long-term, and in the process of communication, they will not blindly cater to the requirements of a certain party, through scientific research, let the children see the parents for their own good intentions, but also let the parents see the real ideas of the children.
Unlike other institutions that only select children who have already won awards, many of the students in the party are children with zero foundation in scientific research. Because in Youfang's view, every child's interest is worth discovering and continuing. Perhaps no amount of flowery terms can be worth a sentence of "I have liked it since I was a child...", and this consistent love is the basis for famous schools to judge how far children can go on the academic road. Using "small interests" to promote "big scientific research" and as an institution to help children show their love and thinking is the performance of responsibility for parents and children.
#02
If I don't do scientific research, do I still have time to compete in two disciplines?
If I don't do research, can I participate in a few more activities?
Obviously, competitions and activities are more visible and tangible than scientific research that requires long-term investment, so scientific research has changed from the problem of "good or bad" to the problem of "value or not".
If all the back-mention projects are isolated, from the result-oriented point of view, then scientific research is obviously not the most cost-effective one, but if you integrate scientific research, competitions, activities and other elements from the overall perspective, it can not only make your image on the resume more plump, but also make the whole planning more efficient.
Among them, scientific research is the most suitable for "main axis".
Let's look at two examples:
Case 1: Based on scientific research, activities and competitions are configured
Classmate A practiced ballet since childhood. In her communication with Ms. Sabrina, she told the teacher about the unpleasant experience of being bullied on the Meigao campus before, which even caused her to have "appearance anxiety".
Teacher Sabrina suggested that she could do some more in-depth text research on the topic of "female appearance anxiety", what is the background cause of this problem? What kind of social values and so on are the reactions? And this study became the cornerstone of her subsequent choice of activities and competitions.
In order to make the research more comprehensive, the teacher suggested that A students can organize some public welfare activities on related topics, such as the "Plus Size Girls" series of variety shows that Tencent Video once did, one of which was a plus size girl dancing ballet. So is the beauty of ballet only enjoyed by the "swan neck" people? She can combine her experience of dancing ballet to plan a public welfare event to explore this issue.
△ Screenshot of the variety show "Promising Me"
After the text + activity, the teacher suggested that student A go to the YOC (Youth Observation) competition and take his results to a larger platform for testing.
Case 2: Combining activities and materials, using scientific research as a focus
Unlike the A classmate above, the B student who was admitted to Stanford last year has always been very concerned about the topic of "feminism" and has participated in many related activities before coming to Youfang. Despite the high quality of these activities, she admits that she has no competitions to participate in compared to other students, and she does not know what the use of these activities is.
And Youfang's teacher told him that as long as she was really interested in digging this point, she didn't need to participate in any competition.
Through an analysis of all the activities she attended, the teacher and she condensed their concerns into a research topic, How Social Media Defines Women's Success. She collects data by posting videos on Youtube and incorporates it into her research through objective analysis and interpretation.
Through these two cases, we can find several interesting conclusions:
- Scientific research has a stronger "malleability" than competitions and activities;
- In fact, scientific research is not as exclusive to science students as we think, and students of arts and social sciences can also be mentioned through scientific research;
- Not all students have to compete, and doing backlifting "in the flow" will only reduce efficiency.
Sabrina teacher said that scientific research is more attractive to children than competitions, the entry threshold is also lower, she has seen a lot of cows and babies of academic opening, not from the subject competition, on the contrary, often in the process of doing scientific research encountered a certain discipline problems, interested in this discipline, or forced themselves to supplement the corresponding knowledge, "by the way" to participate in the competition.
Therefore, the question of "whether it is worth it" in scientific research may be a false proposition at all.
#03
As mentioned earlier, doing scientific research cannot be done quickly, so in the process, what if the child finds that he is not interested or adaptable?
If the first two questions are more about answering the question of "do it or not" in scientific research, then in the end, we focus on a more realistic methodology: with whom? How?
Interestingly, Youfang does not think that university professors are the first choice to guide high school students in their research.
The university is a learning institution that emphasizes autonomy, and those Ivy League professors are usually more graduate students, these students have been subjected to years of academic training, professors have to do, more like assigning tasks and finishing touches, research is mainly solved by students themselves.
After all, the teaching and evaluation system of middle schools is far from independent learning of universities, and the knowledge reserves and scientific research literacy of high school students are far from reaching the level of being able to complete the project by themselves. If too much emphasis is placed on autonomy, the result is often that students are confused and parents are disappointed.
High school students do scientific research, they have to knead, break, step by step to the schedule, by the tutor to take the children to do it. The most suitable tutors for this teaching style are not the Fujian University professors, but the young doctoral students and graduate students, for two reasons:
First, they are closer to the age of high school students, have more common languages, and have a better understanding of the difficulties of student learning;
Second, the practical work experience on the front line allows them to be more aware of the details of the research process, knowing which students can do it and which are not.
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