However, a trend seems to be on the rise. Student research is booming. More than ever, students are participating, and even reveling, in devoting dozens of hours a week into tedious work alongside peers, seniors, and professors for various projects. This got me wondering: what is the driving force behind this new movement? Not that I’m complaining; it’s relieving to see the social conventions shift in a direction of multifaceted exploration, but ultimately, I’m intrigued: why are students investing so much time that could be spent on studies, as expected by social norms?
As I tread deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole that is university applications, I’ve come across something rather interesting. As previously mentioned, extracurricular activities aren’t exactly the biggest thing in Taiwan. There’s only so much they can do to bolster a student’s application, and that’s assuming the student achieves a high enough mark on the national university entrance exam, or the GSAT, to begin with.
Another aspect of this trend is the exclusiveness of research opportunities. Growing up, I’ve only ever participated in one, where I led a research project on agricultural pollution and apple snails, but that opportunity was only bestowed upon me due to my acceptance into our school’s gifted program. In other words, as far as I knew, student research was a niche privilege available only to the academically elite.
This prompted me to go on a research project of my own—a solo project in behavioral sciences, if you will—to explore the research scene, and explore behind the scenes. What was the motivation for these students? How were they managing what they were managing? And, most importantly, how significant and accessible was this trend?
I decided to jump right into the fray and catch a glimpse of all sorts of research students were taking on.
The Trifecta
My path of research landed me in the email inboxes of three students from around the country, each of them excelling in a different field.
The first person I met with was Yi-Jie Cheng, or Eva. A senior at Taipei First Girls High School, she has been working on the design and construction of an ultra-narrow linewidth external cavity diode laser at National Taiwan University for the past two years along with a teammate (who was also her classmate, she shared; just about everyone in her class had a research project of some sort under their belt) and their mentor, professor Ming-Xian Zhang from Academia Sinica.
My second interviewee was Hua-Yun Ke, or Sharon. She currently studies as a junior at Zhongshan Girls High School. For the past two years, she’s worked on herbal medicinal cures for prostate cancer at Academia Sinica with a team of other high schoolers under the lead of professor Pei-Wen Xiao, and is set to continue on this track for the near future.
The above two student researchers accessed these research resources through public programs—but what about personal endeavors? This led me to the doorstep of Jun-Hao Lai. Howard, as his friends call him, is a senior at Ming Dao High School in Taichung, half a country away. A few weeks prior to our interview, he’d embarked on a short-term unpaid internship at the Taichung Power Plant in order to get an in-depth look at how things worked there, what the workflow was like, and above all, to clear up misconceptions about the environmental impact.
Motivation
I’d set out expecting generic responses at best, similar to what you’d expect on an ad targeting high school students and encouraging research participation. “It’s cool,” maybe, or “You get to look cool.” As it turns out, I’d far underestimated the role research played on these students’ lives.
“If I’m being honest, I joined initially because I had to,” Eva said. “I’m in my school’s mathematics and science gifted program, and research courses count towards our credits. But eventually, maybe a few weeks in, maybe a few months, eventually it became something I wanted to complete. I got more and more committed until it was no longer just an obligation, but something personal, something I was proud of.” Just like that, she found herself rolling down the rabbit hole.
Sharon added a few unexpected viewpoints. With the program she enrolled in being hosted by Academia Sinica, she found it an excellent chance to glean insights into what she was truly fit to pursue in university, using her “insider’s perspective” to thoroughly understand what university education entailed. Furthermore, with no AP courses available to her at school and limited hands-on opportunities, her student research project became the ideal gateway to studying ahead, giving her an academic as well as practical advantage over most of her peers.
But perhaps most interesting was Howard: he’d always been a social activist of sorts, and it was fully reflected in his reasons for embarking on his power plant expedition. “I felt obligated to seek the truth,” he said. “Everyone’s blaming the power plant for pollution here in Taichung, but none of us had seen it for ourselves. And I wanted to see how we were handling our energy resources, since we’re entering a denuclearized era.”
Expansion
No plan is complete without preparations for upscaling, and the three student researchers before me were no exception. They each harbored their own goals, dreams, and ambitions, the halo of which shone through their responses.
I’d first met Eva at a quantum computing bootcamp last year, and the same topic came up when she mentioned potential expansions for her laser cooling project. Quantum computing qubits were often manipulated at imperceptible scales by precise lasers, and she envisioned that her current work may someday contribute to the next big breakthrough in quantum manipulation stability and efficiency. “Or just physics in general,” she added. Considering how critical a part of applied physics optics played, it made sense: her work could be implemented in more fields than we could be bothered to count.
Sharon had equally impressive aspirations. “I hope to see a medical breakthrough,” she said wistfully. “Perhaps a proper medical cure for prostate cancer could be developed stemming from the groundwork our team laid.” Off-camera, she’d explained that there currently was a medical method for detecting prostate cancer, but being overly-sensitive, it returned too many false positives. Her team thus used certain herbal medicines to create molecular markers with which cancer cells could be identified; this solid foundation made expansion on all fronts equally feasible.
Howard’s plans of expansion took on a more practical note. He proposed creating a series of videos to bring the information he’d gleaned to the masses, so that everyone could get a clear, unbiased look into the country’s energy situation and possible future pathways. Another of his plans was petitioning to make excursions like his more common and easily accessible for all interested teenagers. “It’s our generation,” he said. “We need to know where we stand.”
Accessibility
One question cropped up very early on into this article: how accessible were these research opportunities to the lay person? I remembered my own days of student academic research: I hadn’t even gotten to as professional a level as Eva and Sharon’s projects, and that was already an opportunity exclusive to only the academically elite at school.
As it turns out, the research scene had gotten a lot more open in recent years. Although Eva got her foot in the door through academic excellence as well, a la her school’s gifted program, what she’d seen afterwards led to the realization that research opportunities were abundant and accessible, if one acknowledged their existence and was willing to go the extra mile. “Know what you want to do, have a clear sight of how you want to proceed, and just email a professor in a related field,” Eva said almost nonchalantly. “Their emails are provided on the websites of their respective schools, like Academia Sinica or National Taiwan University. Some will ask you to meet with them, and with luck they’ll take you in as a student.”
She also touched upon how one could participate in research, with or without a mentor. “Find a topic you’re truly passionate about, something you’re willing to devote most of your time to. Have a roadmap of how you want to get there.” She then took a moment to clarify that having a mentor didn’t mean you had everything cut out for you either. “Even in my program, the professor doesn’t just tell us what to do step by step. He gives us some thesis papers, some resources, and tells us what we should accomplish. We then try to complete the goal, and of course oftentimes there are mistakes. But only then will he tell us what direction to work in, what to consider fixing, and we proceed through trial and error.”
Sharon echoed the sentiment about research becoming increasingly approachable. She’d entered her program via an application process open to the public— “Every tenth grader can apply,” she said. One could argue that the difficulty and competitiveness of the process made the program mostly inaccessible, but she told me that there were accepted students from all around the country and all walks of life. The second round was also a holistic interview rather than a pure academics-based exam. “The opportunity is there for everyone,” she repeated. “You just have to work for it and grasp it.” And it did make perfect sense: being accessible didn’t mean that just about anyone could be a researcher; the application process gave all interested parties an equal opportunity, then chose the ones that would fit in under a high-pressure thinktank setting.
That wasn’t to say one couldn’t prepare themselves in hopes of bolstering their chances for acceptance. Sharon recommended studying ahead: “The first round is mostly science and math exams meant to benchmark your academic skills, so you can definitely prepare for that. That leaves your traits to determine whether you get in or not.”
Research internships like Howard’s were similarly open to the public, if not even more so. He told me that the fire power plant was open for quick introductions, and many other opportunities were available through a simple application process. Much like what Eva had said about her type of research, Howard divulged that the opportunities were there and had always been there, just not recognized widely enough. “The problem is that way too few people know about their existence,” he said. “And that’s what I want to change, sort of.”
Revelations and Misconceptions
My interviewees shared a refreshed viewpoint on student research.
“A lot of people, even student researchers like ourselves, might think that research is done just for science fairs,” Eva said, “They think it’s for reputation or fame or something like that. But what research really is supposed to be about is the process. You do it because there’s a topic you’re passionate about, or a problem you want to solve, and you want to find more than just the results. That’s research.”
She lamented to having fallen into this pitfall in her early days. Then again, who didn’t? What was touching was listening to her describe her transition from treating research as a task she “had to do” into a target she “wanted to do.” Slowly, research became a commitment in and of itself—she was past needing research for school credits, but still she found herself yearning to return to the lab.
Sharon also shared a misconception she hadn’t grasped until she found herself in the lab. “We often think research is something cool, maybe even easy. We think it’s like you go into a lab, twiddle with stuff, and invent something new every day. But it’s not like that,” she said. “Research is cool, sure, but it’s a very tedious process; sometimes it even gets boring. You spend days tweaking one variable at a time, doing things at a snail’s pace.” Despite all this, she agreed that research is still something worth doing in high school. “School doesn’t let you operate state-of-the-art technologies and equipment. There’s barely any hands-on. But here you get to experiment with those, and as a bonus, you can reflect on whether you really want to study in a certain field or not.”
“There’s no exact perfect answer to any problem,” Howard said when I asked him about his revelations. “For example, we say we’re going to develop more green energy. But right now it’s creating more problems than it solves: there’s financial issues, and more opinions to evaluate, and then there’s efficiency problems.” Energy aside, he also mentioned how he realized how important awareness was. He closed out the interview with a memo for our generation: “If there’s something you’re unsure about, or if there’s something you want to learn more about, don’t hesitate. Just go seek it out.”
Then there’s me and this behavioral science research expedition. With all said and done, with the cameras packed away and hours of footage edited, I suppose I walked away heartened. This trend of curiosity and eagerness was rising ever higher; education was making a turn away from the traditional simple score-and-grade evaluations, and as an increasing student population poured their hearts and souls into such research, one could hope that the trend would someday bloom into a staple of our generation. We are thinkers, creators, dreamers, and explorers, all rolled into one. And as reflected in this ever-rising trend of independent student research, we are tapping into our strengths at last. What’s not to love about that?