Reply to Tell High School Students to Stop Contacting Professors

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It might help to consider how the professor can justify time- and resource-expenditure on a high-schooler in response to institutional incentives.

My kid did a free summer STEM program at our local research university that gave him legitimate access (no cold-calling!) to a few of the profs there because those profs had agreed to sponsor a certain number of HS kids in their labs for the summer. It was a thing they did and got credit for doing internally: they put those kids' names on their CVs and the kids' photos on the lab's website and later bragged about the kids' college admission successes. At the end of the summer, my kid had a good enough working relation with one of the grad students in the lab where he'd worked over the summer that it was natural to extend the arrangement through the school year.

But here's the key: these profs were given an institutional incentive to welcome those high-schoolers (rising seniors) into their labs.

With no such institutional incentive, it's just cruel to expect high-schoolers to cold-call professors seeking research experience. That's like expecting undergrads to recruit a future dissertation committee by asking random profs to do them a personal favor. The institutional incentives to work with grad students and undergrads can be extended to high-schoolers, but it takes some advance work that high schools and universities ought to be doing together.[/quote] So who has the power here, if not the professors? Dean's? Chancellors?[/quote]

The point is that this use of professors' time needs to be recognized within the institution.  For such mentoring to do any good, it can't be just responding to an email or two.  Most professors are happy to do that.  Beyond that, most profs would be happy to do [i]one-off[/i] outreach at a high school.  But having a high-schooler working in your lab?  Serving as your informal research assistant?  That's a much bigger commitment, and the prof has to be able to put it on her or his CV or otherwise get institutional acknowledgement.  For that to be possible, there has to be some kind of program in place -- some way of codifying that 'this is one of the things we do.'

I'm the parent who wrote the post under discussion here, and just yesterday I talked at length with the professor my kid is working with.  The prof is putting a fair bit of time in mentoring my kid, and one of the prof's grad students is putting even more time into it, and they're incentivized to do this because each can put it on their CV in terms of their participation in the XYZ Program, an 'outreach' program that everyone internally assessing that CV recognizes as an important use of institutional resources.  (The prof told me that participation will count toward their upcoming tenure case -- not as much as teaching or publications, but some.)

Who set up this program?  I don't know -- all I can say is 'the university' or maybe 'the university's Board of Governors.'  Not individual professors, or an individual department -- though it's possible that an individual department could decide that it's going to encourage its faculty to do such 'outreach' and give credit for that internally under 'departmental service' or the like.

The point is that you can't expect professors to put tens or scores of work-day hours into something that doesn't figure as an institutionally recognized part of their jobs.  It's not about whether they're 'kind' or whether they 'care' or the like.  It's about the nature of jobs they do.  There could be -- and are (you can look them up) -- outreach programs that enable high-schoolers to do college-level research.  But cold-calling isn't a way to find them or create them.[/quote] I'm asking who has the power to make the institution recognize/reward this kind of service[/quote]

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