Preparing For High School Education In Usa

Time for an aside.

I wrote what I did above, fully knowing how inadequate it is to really convey what I mean and how to go about it all. This is where a mentor is invaluable - someone in your field of interest with whom you can test out your thinking. Hard to find one, but the effort must be made.

At every point in your career, there are two arenas you need to pay attention to: The first is the one where you are a performer. Here you are being judged and evaluated. You may be competing. The second is where you can be 'yourself', ignorance, inexperience and all, without fear of censure - here judgment is offered, but without penalty.

This second is what a mentor (the right one) can do for you. A good mentor would be one who has already seen you at your worst - i.e. when you are young, a beginner, when you know little. Such a person is someone with whom you can try out your ideas before expressing them in the arena of competitive performance and judgment.

Ideally, this is what an internship (and internship mentor) should offer!

If you are very lucky, the two arenas can overlap (if you have a good grad advisor for example). However, there will always be situations where they won't. You should be clear in your head which arena you are operating in at any given time.

I know that all this is not very clear. It's much easier to convey this in person and demonstrate how it works than it is to write it down!

 

Invaluable points @sokanasanah. Lucky for ds he has a wonderful faculty advisor who is also good in his field and since he still has 4 more yrs i am sure he will have more clarity). And networking is something we are pushing him to do, (he has his issues owing to being a special child and one of the reasons i work parallely to collect more information.).

Not going to say thank you again and agajn because it feels insufficient.

@Rihana i hope i am not hijacking this thread..

 

I haven't helped with his home work/project since his 3rd grade.

As an Indian, he has to work harder to prove himself than some; how his ideas/voice/opinion had gone deaf eared until it comes from a better sounding board. A typical struggle for an Indian until he establishes himself.

Slowly, he learned the ropes...or understood the world. He got the hang of Gilbert cartoon - Ashok.

 

Can you imagine...we used have such mentors assigned to help in my early days. No, haven't seen such mentors assigned at work or the term 'good old boys network' any more since the 'out sourcing'.

 

It is always a struggle these days and i. Did not mean as in homework literally. @poovai if in india it is with peers and the so called teacher and lecturers and their egos and outside to be heard beyond being the indian..

Real good mentors are hard to come by.
Oh boy we had some even in ms..who laid the foundation for us. I wish the one ds has been assigned does help him , he is good in his field. It is a gamble..

So sad to hear it is the same elsewhere on a different tangent

 

Sigh its forgotten atleast in the industry . SGI-pioneers in graphics desktops(dont even know how many folks here will remember that company..todays Google campus ) . They had a wonderful culture of assigning each new /fresh grad engineers to a mentor within the organization .Not necessarily their immediate boss but someone slightly removed from immediate group but knowledge in the domain . I wish we could revive this...not just for interns but for reg employees as well.

 

Another brief detour, before we pick up the train of thought in the posts above:

Even though he has a full four years left, it is not too early to start investigating requirements for grad schools, etc., in a relaxed and unpressured fashion. The advantage of doing this early is that it gives you an idea of what 'being prepared for grad school' really means. It will help you plan and fill in gaps, academic and otherwise. There are other reasons as well. Here's an example:

Someone I know decided to have her baby after graduating with a Ph.D. It was the right time for them. Her husband had a new job, they had moved to a new city, bought a new house, life was falling into place, and they were in their early thirties. So why not start a family? All was cool. Cute baby arrived, morphed into a toddler. Now, after about a year, she decided to get back to her career, found a research group she liked, got back into research. She started looking for fellowship funding. Hai, hai, hai, hey Ram! What's this? Three out of five agencies require that you apply for a fellowship within one year of your graduating with a Ph.D.*. Holy smokes. She reduced her chances by 60% without even trying! No one had told her about this. She had not investigated this. If she had, then she could have lined up a position, deferred it for some months or a year and sent in fellowship proposals anyway. See what I mean? This is the sort of stupid lesson that 'experience' teaches you.

So start early. Just casually investigate your fields of interest, people, research areas, funding possibilities, whatever. Keep it quiet. Be discreet. You don't want your desi prof admonishing you to focus on passing your freshman-year exams first before thinking about highfalutin' research but do it anyway. If you do it right, you will learn a thing or two. The interwebs make such research so much easier! Use that to the max. Keep a log.

TL;DR - Your tastes will change as you get further along in your undergraduate career, the programs you are interested in may change their requirements as well. Still, start investigating early. The exercise can be one element in refining your tastes.

*Note that such rules discriminate against women who could be approaching or in their thirties when they finish their doctoral work. The justification offered is that they want people committed to research - no dilly-dallying. (Not sure if such rules are still in effect).

PS: I know this is a high-school thread, but the same argument for starting early applies at any point. Maybe I'll expand on that later - start in middle-school for high-school planning, in high-school for undergrad planning ... you get the drift.

 

@sokanasanah i think i will ask for more pointers next yr. the plan is as you have detailed.

The course is a 5 years masters here with a small window to exit at 3rd yr. i am not convinced he should do that but he is thinking about it too, so a couple of them together are checking at things that would work. And yes we are in the work in progress for the application. The work would probably be more because we have to find the ones that accept this 5yrs for the phd programme. Also if masters after 3 yrs the number of papee, internship that will tilt in his favor.
And i did not think that this would fall in STEM. (A misinterpretation on my side) will tell him to look at opportunties there too
Will come back to pick on this route again.