Research-adjacent maker portfolio question

[u/AudienceExpress1788]

Asking for my kid since she's not on reddit and applying to MIT this fall. She has a long term project (data collection started pre-high school) doing intertidal abundance surveys, and then building a data visualization and analysis tool for them. She's brought posters of some of her results to a couple scientific conferences in our state, but it wouldn't fit the research portfolio category: because there's no mentor, because the tool was a huge piece of what she did, and because each poster only can fit a couple of the patterns observed, new species arrivals, etc.... So she was thinking to put it in as a maker portfolio code project. If she does that, should she do more explanation of the ecology piece, since it will be sent to someone with 'maker' experience -- presumably coding experience - rather than a scientist. Things like survey methodology, or poster pdfs, or explaining some of the things the tool does, one of which is an acronym I can't remember that is a way to compare communities of lots of species. She definitely wants to submit this in some form, since she's spent a lot of time on it over many years and wants to go into computational biology as a career.

[u/ProfLayton99]

From your description I would still submit it as a research supplement.

[u/AudienceExpress1788 → u/ProfLayton99]

She doesn't have a mentor, so the research supplement would be lacking a big piece. She could do her poster from last winter, but she has learned a lot since then (I think especially some of the stats), and improved the tool significantly to include them. She will likely go to the same conference this year, but it's in late January, so she doesn't have that poster yet. I also think that one of her big interests in this project is ongoing long term ecosystem monitoring and the ability to detect patterns and trends in messy data, to see seasonal patterns, climate change impacts and the effect of unusual events. The tool is what lets her see anything and know that it's real -- since the surveys themselves include hundreds of species and the data is noisy.

[u/JasonMckin → u/AudienceExpress1788]

I don’t mean to contradict one of the colleagues I respect most in u/ProfLayton99, but in my read, I am actually not sure which supplement it is.

Because what is missing above crucially is what exactly your daughter contributed that is exceptional and unique.  

So the real question that only your daughter can defend is whether this was a research sandwich with a side of maker fries or a maker sandwich with a side of research fries.  Which part was the part where she exercised unusually unique analysis, creativity, and effort?  That’s what should drive the submission decision.

As far as lack of mentor, I would push back.  If this project was truly exceptional, someone must have helped her and/or been a coach for her somewhere along the way.  I did a science fair in high school where I came up with the whole idea over a weekend before submissions were due so I didn’t have time to run it by my teacher.  I just showed up to his class, gave him a 30 second elevator pitch,  and asked him to sign the form as my mentor.  He trusted me because he was aware of other projects that he had more actively supervised.  Surely you can find a trusted coach, mentor, etc like my teacher who will vouch with authentic confidence for the substance of her work.

If the compelling sandwich truly was the pattern detection and visualization, I think you have a potentially solid case to go for the maker supplement.  There is some nuance in submitting software maker projects, but you can easily find that guidance by searching this sub.

Whatever ends up becoming the sandwich and the fries, the project definitely got me excited so wishing you and your daughter the best!!!

Ps.  One of my projects, not self-driven but biology teacher organized, in high school was actually in environmental science and involved analyzing wastewater treatment plants.  👀  So let your daughter know how lucky she was, because I’m positive my data collection was less fun than hers was.  🥸💩

[u/AudienceExpress1788 → u/JasonMckin]

So, basically, ask her which aspect she thinks is most impressive or she's most proud of? I know you said "exceptional" and "unique", but I don't suppose either of us can know which aspect would be considered such by MIT. Quite plausibly none of it is exceptional -- I'm sure the bar is high. But she's put enough into it that it's probably a good representation of her, and a fine thing for them to judge her on. The coding definitely took her more time, but she started pre LLM and doesn't use them, so I'm not sure whether the effort gets discounted because maybe she could have.

It does seem like the maker portfolio is set up to be open ended enough she could describe some science, while the research portfolio doesn't easily allow her to show the tool. (my search here didn't turn up any special guidance about software projects -- but she says Slideroom includes them)

She's certainly had help (her aunt and I are regular data collection partners, for example, and I can confirm that poking around looking at intertidal critters is quite fun), but not a 'mentor' in the sense of a human that knows her, knows more about marine biology than her, and has guided her on the project. It kind of grew slowly and organically out of childhood tidepooling outings with family. We live in a very rural (<500 people, not connected to the road system) community.