How can a high school student get involved in research?

[Robbie Gerstner]

I'm currently in high school and interested in physics. I want to get involved in research somehow - whether it be as an intern, or actually conducting a project, so I can expose myself to the process and community.
First of all, is this worth it? Will it help me get accepted into a good program for university? Will it be a valuable experience to have?
How much physics should I know before attempting research?
I don't know where to start looking for these opportunities. Either summer or during the school year works.

 

[Vanadium 50]

See https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/feasibility-of-research-in-high-school.897794/

 

[Dr. Courtney]

I'm currently in high school and interested in physics. I want to get involved in research somehow - whether it be as an intern, or actually conducting a project, so I can expose myself to the process and community.
First of all, is this worth it? Will it help me get accepted into a good program for university? Will it be a valuable experience to have?
How much physics should I know before attempting research?
I don't know where to start looking for these opportunities. Either summer or during the school year works.

Doing a project or two for an ISEF-affiliated fair is your best bet. Look at the other thread. I ended up mentoring (from a distance, via email and Skype) a couple of Calaver's projects. One won first in category at his regional fair and was published in a peer reviewed journal. The second project is presently under review at an appropriate journal. Calaver was a great student and has been accepted to a couple of high quality physics programs with solid scholarship offers. This student was good enough that I invited him to my lab in Louisiana to work together on experimental projects, but he preferred other topics (more interesting to him) that more or less came down to analyzing public data sets.

I've mentored a number of other science projects also - including 12 state level winners of first in category and several participants in national or international level events. No doubt it can be a valuable experience.

How much physics should you know first? That depends on your chosen project. You have to be able to do a few things really well, but what those few things are really depend on the project you pick. The physics in one state level winning project I mentored involved little more than the work-energy theorem, but it was an extremely clever experimental design with lots of data. Another state level winning physics project I mentored didn't even get the physics right (cringeworthy, I know) but once again, it involved a solid experiment and an empirical model with accurate predictive power (more of a least squares fit to a power law than known physics principles). A project I mentored this year (2nd in region, 4th in state) didn't even have any equations (gasp!), just a solid experiment and rank ordering of the average values for the different experimental conditions.

At lots of science fair levels, getting the scientific method itself right is a lot more important than accurately understanding all the underlying physics.

But for a real physicist to let you into their lab requires winning their trust and bringing enough skills to the table that you are likely to save them more labor than it takes to babysit you. Not many high school students are anywhere close to that.

 

[romsofia]

This reminds me of when I was your age! The best thing to do is, send out some emails to professors doing research at local universities. Tell them what math you know, and what physics you know and if there are any opportunities to help. It never hurts to network, so even if they have no openings, don't be scared to ask if you can even just check out their lab and see what they do (if they have the time of course).

In fact, here is a thread that I made similar to yours when I was your age: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/research-as-a-high-school-student.435979/