The Logistics of Mentoring High School Students

 I imagine that I'll eventually have more to say about the actual mentoring aspect of it, but this right here is a bit of a rant about how difficult it is to mentor high school students in a scientific research setting. I've been participating in the inaugural year of a program doing exactly that at my university, and it has been a bit of a nightmare, even for me as someone not in charge of the program, with paperwork.

High schoolers are really limited by what they can do in a laboratory setting. I believe these rules are designed to prevent them from doing much of anything except watching, but that isn't explicitly said anywhere. You aren't supposed to let them handle any chemicals, including ethanol, so that cuts down the experiments. And they can't handle anything that is a biosafety level 2 or above. Which mostly means that they cannot handle anything from humans, although other animals can be fair game. So you have to keep all of this in mind when designing experiments.

Once you get past all that, there's also the paperwork of getting permission for them to be in lab. I'm not familiar with the details, but I do know that there were several hoops to go through. Not to mention that multiple forms are flat out incorrect about the information that they ask for, I know one of them states that they require an individual's tax id but what they actually need is your social security number. This set back the student in my lab, we had to have multiple meetings about it before it could be sorted so that he could get paid for his work.

What has really been affecting my day-to-day though is the level of supervision required for mentoring a high schooler. They aren't supposed to go anywhere alone so I have to chaperone him from place to place and keep an eye on him in the lab. Which for the most part is fine, it's not like I'm going anywhere, but it does change the feel a bit. Usually you're expected to do independent research, and like it says, work independently. I worry that my student isn't having that experience because he isn't allowed to work independently. I'm encouraging him to work on his own when he feels comfortable, but technically I don't think I'm supposed to even be doing that much.

Getting research experience early on is so crucial for knowing what you want to do and what path you want to take. Putting all of these restrictions on, making it harder to students to have fulfilling experiences, just makes these programs less likely to exist. I feel like schools with a vested interest in recruiting students should be making this process easier, not harder. I hope that this can change, that programs like the one I'm participating in will become more established and help more students, but I also know that change in academia is slow going when it happens. So we shall see where it goes from here.