So you want to compete at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), or even just your local science fair. Good. The first hurdle is also the hardest: with so many directions to go, how do you pick a project worth doing? This guide walks through how to choose one.
Rishab Jain, a Harvard student and ISEF winner, has a YouTube channel on science research and winning ISEF:
- How to win 1st place at ISEF: https://youtu.be/sqfzvvn2GY0
- How to design a winning poster: https://youtu.be/qWERHVs14uE
- How to come up with a research topic: https://youtu.be/AEgL_sjoE4o
- How to find a research mentor: https://youtu.be/tKmS4UZbfII
- Paid coaching for winning science fair: https://rishabacademy.com/stem
Start with what you care about
The best projects start from a genuine interest. Pick a topic you actually care about, because you’ll be living with it for months. A student into renewable energy might test the efficiency of different solar panels. Someone drawn to wildlife conservation might study how habitat loss affects a particular species. When the project lines up with what you care about, you stay engaged, and engaged students do better work.
Find a mentor
A good mentor speeds everything up. Look for someone who shares your interest and has the expertise to shape your ideas, troubleshoot experiments, and tighten your presentation. For a full walkthrough on finding one, here’s a video Rishab made on his YouTube channel.
Resources worth using
There’s a lot online, and most of it isn’t useful. Rishab Academy has courses and free YouTube videos aimed squarely at science fair, from full master courses to short how-to clips, so you’re not sorting through everything alone.
Choosing your project: step by step
Here’s a step-by-step approach, based on Rishab’s YouTube video on choosing a research topic.
Step 1: Take in information. Start broad. Read Wikipedia on topics that interest you and follow the links to go deeper. Take notes as a mind map so you can see how ideas connect.
Step 2: Keep going. Move beyond Wikipedia to news articles and YouTube videos. Pull the keywords out of your mind map and search them on Google. You’ll hit some junk, but you’ll also find sources worth keeping.
Step 3: Generate questions. From what you’ve gathered, start writing down questions that make you curious. Aim for “how” and “why” questions, the kind that push real scientific reasoning. (These are the higher tiers of Costa’s levels of questioning.)
Step 4: Research. Use a tool like Typeset to find papers related to your questions. Do a quick literature review, summarising the key findings, then narrow to something a student can realistically do: quantitative projects, data analysis, simulations, or theoretical work.
Step 5: Get mentorship and feedback. Join science research communities, like Rishab’s Discord server where motivated STEM students talk shop, and find a mentor to sharpen your thinking. Run your project ideas and methods past peers and mentors so you get real feedback before you commit.
Work through those steps and you’ll land on a project that fits your interests and is doable, which is the right place to start.
Side note: making a clean poster
Want a good-looking poster without printing and gluing a stack of slides? Rishab’s partner, Postersmith, does fabric poster printing, which is easy to roll up and travel with.
They ship same day, deliver within two days, and will check your poster’s image quality before printing.
Use code RISHABJAIN at checkout for $15 off. Order two or more posters and you get an extra $20 off. Or:
- Get 10% off with this link: https://postersmith.com/poster/sponsor/RISHABACADEMY
The bottom line
Choosing a science fair project isn’t really about the award. It’s about learning something new and following a question you care about. Stay curious, expect setbacks, and lean on your mentors and resources like Rishab Academy. Pick a topic that’s genuinely yours and the rest gets a lot easier.
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