Program Week 2: Meet your students, brainstorm

Hello! Welcome to week two of the Boston Latin Science Fair Mentoring Program. This week you will meet your assigned student and begin brainstorming project ideas. As we said during orientation, the brain storming process will be one of the most difficult parts of the program. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• DO push the project in a direction you feel comfortable advising in
• DO let you student know if they need to attend a safety training to work in your lab
• DO let Meg, Karina or Kathleen know if you will be conducting research at school
• DO consider projects that involve interesting scientific technologies. The high school labs are limited so things as unglamorous as PCR can make for exciting projects.
• DO give your student a clear idea of what they need to accomplish before your next meeting
• DO keep in contact via e-mail with your student if you have ideas or input for them during the week
• DO contact Meg with even the smallest questions you might have, she is here to keep you happy!
  

• DON'T do a project that involves human subjects...it is a paperwork nightmare!
• DON'T do a project that involves isolation of bacteria from the environment without first discussing the project with Karina to make sure you are aware of all the required precautions.
  
• DON'T let your student handle ethidium bromide, you must do those portions of the experiment.
  
• DON'T just build a model, design a project using the principles of the scientific method
  
• DON'T WORRY! If you don't have a project by the end of your first meeting, try to think about things that might be interesting over the course of the week.
  

Good luck!

Project Selection, a few tips

Based on our previous experience the most challenging aspect of your job as a mentor will be facilitating the project brainstorming process. Some students will come to their first meeting with you having a pretty good idea of what kind of project they want to do, and with a little guidance will be able to rapidly develop their ideas into a project. Other students will have ideas, but they will be, let’s say, a little too big for the scope of our program, for example “find the gene responsible for cancer.” In this case your job is to rein in their enthusiasm and focus them toward a project in their initial topic of interest. Some students, maybe even most, will have no ideas. Resist the temptation to just give them a project on a plate! It is quite acceptable for a student not to have an initial idea, but its not your job to do the legwork for them.

Mentors from previous years have requested more guidance in the brainstorming process. Here are some suggestions for how to approach the brainstorming session:

1. Start with introductions. Find out how far the student has advanced through his/her science curriculum. Tell them a little about yourself: where you are from, what you majored in as an undergraduate, what your background is since college. Talk briefly about what it is you currently do or did before you retired.
   
2. Ask if your student has any project ideas or special areas of interest. Try to generate a project together inspired by these ideas if possible.Tell the student which projects you would be able to help the most with and which you feel will probably be the most successful.
3. Determine if the resources are available to complete all the projects the student has brainstormed. You can do this by talking to one of the coordinators and/or consulting the list of resources.If all of the ideas are too ambitious try to determine why the student is interested in these areas, and suggest some more reasonable topics within the areas the student is interested in.
   
4. It is perfectly acceptable for you to suggest project ideas, provided the student seems to have made a real effort to develop some ideas on his/her own. However, the student should, at the very least, have chosen the general area from which the project ideas are coming.
5. Try to steer the student towards a hypothesis driven project. One of the points of the science fair is to teach students the scientific method.
6. If you are inviting the student to conduct research in your lab, there are special considerations during the brainstorming process. The student will not be as familiar as you are with the resources available, and may not be able to articulate how they might be used, but even so will be capable of performing and understanding fairly sophisticated experiments. In this case it is acceptable to spoon-feed the student a little more during the brainstorming process. If you wish, you could give the student the option to choose from several projects tangential to something that might already be going on in your laboratory. If possible, outline a project within one of their general topics of interest. If you take this approach it is important to make sure that the student fully understands the project and is able to explain it and answer questions about it by the end of the program.
   

What do you do if its just not working? Sometimes the brainstorming process feels like pulling teeth. For some reason your student is not able to formulate an idea or in the worst case even pick a topic that really interests them. This can be really frustrating for both of you.

1. In this case back up and take it step by step. Tell the student that they must choose a topic by the end of the second student-mentor meeting.
   
2. You might consider going with your student to the BLS computer lab. There are tons of web resources that talk about science fair project ideas, many of which are posted on our blog. It is better not to copy someone else’s old science project idea, but you can adapt an old idea by slightly changing some of the variables or the question.
   
3. At this point, if things are still not working, go ahead and just feed your own ideas to the student. Just because the student could not come up with an idea does not mean that the process has been a failure. They’ve been exposed to the difficulties of coming up with new research ideas.
4. If the student rejects your ideas or you don’t have any ideas, shoot Meg an email at the end of your second meeting with the student. The program coordinators will step in to intervene with the student and will try to come up with some project ideas, one of which the student will have to choose.

Mentor Orientation

Mentor Orientation will take place on September 25th and September 27th, you only need to attend one day. Orientation will be at Boston Latin School. Boston Latin school is located at 78 Avenue Louis Pasteur; Boston, MA 02115. The school's phone number is: (617) 635-8895. When you arrive at Boston Latin, please follow the sign to the front office where you will check in. You will be directed from the front office to the orientation meeting location. Your contacts at Boston Latin are Alex Montes and Kathleen Bateman.
At Mentor Orientation you can expect the following to be covered:

1. Introductions: so far you have primarily been corresponding with Meg, who is in charge of mentor recruiting and mentor relations. At orientation you will meet Kathleen Bateman, the Science Program Director for Boston Latin and Karina Meiri, a Tufts professor who has been a program administrator since its inception.
   
2. Paperwork: you will be asked to sign a form that authorizes the Boston School District to do a background check, which will certify that you can work with children. ALL volunteers in Boston area schools are required to file this paperwork before they can work with students.
3. Orientation Packet: This is really the bulk of the orientation session. This packet will cover the basic "rules" for science fair projects to be eligible for science fair, as well as some of our tips for mentors.
4. Questions and Answer
   

Dear Prospective Mentor:

Thank you for your interest in the Boston Latin Science Fair Mentoring Program. This program begins with a mentor orientation session on either September 25^th or the 27^th, depending on which day of the week you choose to mentor. The program will run for ten weeks, during which time you will work with a high school student on formulating a small research project, implementing that project and analyzing the results. Mentors meet with students on either Tuesday or Thursday between 2:30-4. If you are a BBS gradate student interested in fulfilling your TA requirement in this program, you must mentor a student on Tuesday and Thursday. While some students are flexible enough to meet on other days of the week (Monday-Friday), students can generally only meet with mentors immediately after school at 2:30.

In the past mentors have spent from 1-6 hours per week working with their student, depending on the intensity of the project and the stage of the project (for example, you may have 2 weeks of experiments that require a greater time commitment, followed by several weeks of analysis where you only meet for one hour). We encourage mentors to take their students into their labs for the experimental portion of their project, but we do have lab space available at Boston Latin if that is not possible (but equipment is limited). Boston Latin is conveniently located adjacent to Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health and Merck and houses some of the best students Boston has to offer. Our students are highly motivated and past students have gone on to win awards at the highest levels of the science fair!

Thanks again for your consideration! Our program is not possible without the generous donation of time from our volunteers from the Longwood Medical area! If you are interested in applying to mentor in this program please email boston.latin.science.fair@gmail.com for an application.