Introduction
In this article, we will be teaching you exactly how to win the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, walking you through a step by step procedure based on how Harvard Undergraduate Rishab Jain won the 3M Young Scientist Challenge himself.
Steps to Win 3M Young Scientist Challenge:
Step 1: Create your Idea
Whatever it is that you are passionate about, you need to formulate some sort of concrete idea that builds off your scientific field of interest, and wield this idea as a compass to navigate you forward. Getting an idea can be difficult sometimes, and if you are struggling with figuring out how to do so, check out this blog and this blog with a full overview just for that.
Step 2: Find a Mentor
This is an optional step albeit, but one that is highly recommended for high schoolers and middle schoolers who have made substantial progress on their overall project construction but are unsure whether it possesses the level of complexity that judges at the 3M Young Scientist Challenge (or any other challenge) may be looking for.
Finding a mentor is a difficult process, and requires many failed attempts of cold emailing and shooting your shot in the dark. After you’ve completed a literature review and delved deep into your project, the primary recommendation would be to… well…. do more research.
This time, you want to try to curate your search results as much as possible to just deliver to you search results around mentors that YOU know will be best suited for your project. One way to do that is to search for the title of your project cluster, e.g. pancreatic cancer histopathology, followed by the words “lab site:*.edu” or “research site:*.edu”, depending on whether your project research is primarily constricted to a laboratory or not.
Then, once you’ve found some search results that you like, compile a list of emails using a FREE template with professors, scientists, or anyone who you would like to work in partnership with for your project. Assembling all of this information in an organized manner will make it far easier to start blasting out emails.
Finally, start sending emails. 3-5 a day compounded over a month becomes 90-150 emails sent, and it is practically guaranteed that at least one of those people will agree to hop onto a zoom call and discuss your project with you if you approach them in the right manner.
After that, prepare yourself beforehand, meet with you mentor, try to sell your project idea to them, and you’re golden! Well, not quite, as failure will still be imminent at these later stages. However, repeating this process over and over again will eventually land you up with a mentor kind and willing enough to help you succeed, and you can be sure at that point that you will have the necessary guidance and backup to fine-tune your project to the end.
Step 3: Polishing Things Up
Now that you have a mentor and a project idea, all that is left to do is burn the midnight oil away. Once you’ve finalized your project and have pieced everything together as per your mentor’s guidance, you should absolutely get one last pair of eyes to look through your presentation and hold a mock judging session to prepare you for the entry into the challenge.
One way to do that through the lens of an expert would be to book a consultation call with Rishab Jain, as his past experience in the competition is extremely lucrative in crafting your project into exactly what he knows it should look like.
Bonus: What a Past Winner Did
Are you still stuck feeling like your project isn’t headed in the direction you would like it to for the 3M Young Scientist Challenge or a different type of Science Fair? See what Rishab Jain, the aforementioned past winner of this contest, did for his own project to funnel in your direction some profound inspiration.
Resources to Win More STEM Competitions as a High Schooler:
Do you want to become serious about learning and thriving in the STEM research community, and win competitions like the 3M Young Scientist Challenge and more? Check out the below resources to join us!
Join our discord: https://discord.gg/3GFYYCJb
Subscribe to Rishab Jain: https://www.youtube.com/@RishabJainK/playlists
View our paid courses: https://www.rishabacademy.com/courses
View our free courses: https://www.rishabacademy.com/free
Check out Rishab Jain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rishab-jain-k/
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