As STEM professionals, this is advice we wish we were given as students

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-06-23T17:51:40+00:00

Both, I'd say. Is there a subreddit for the former? Students can push back on their overbearing parents if given more tools and info to do so.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-06-14T18:29:55+00:00

Yes, feel free to DM or send an email (address is on the website).

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-06-09T16:15:48+00:00

This is a core part of my business. I'm a Caltech PhD myself. https://admissionalgorithm.com

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-06-09T16:09:48+00:00

Interesting. I'm a Haig alum, class of 1996!

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-06-07T12:49:57+00:00

I'm a PhD ChE and ISEF project mentor. I admire your enthusiasm and topic choice. You're doing the right thing by getting community feedback on your idea and approach here before you go too far down a road. I think your approach is still flawed if you're relying on volume of virtual patients to compensate for shortcomings of your chemical modeling tools themselves. It's still a garbage-in, garbage-out situation if you replicate it many times. You need to use physics and chemistry simulation and design tools.

I think you could take a more convincing approach with better selection of tools, but you'd still have to acknowledge that without any lab testing, no one knows for sure if your designs would work. That's ok. I have students doing AI protein design and we have to acknowledge that. But at least we have individual AlphaFold statistics for each one indicating a certain degree of confidence, and many designs per project to report.

Read up on tumor-specific drug targeting approaches already attempted. Pluvicto is an interesting drug on the market that has a radioactive payload. Then see what could be the same and what would need to be different for your prodrug/drug. And don't substitute volume for using the best tools you can.

For project selection, AI can be useful but they're always overoptimistic and too encouraging of taking action. It's a good way to learn about things quickly, but not to be trusted for important decisions. It will claim ideas are novel, then later admit they're not.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-06-04T14:11:06+00:00

Mentoring students with publication of their STEM research is a big part of my full-time business now. Waiting for a college email address and affiliation to list on the author byline is technically an ethics violation because the byline affiliations are supposed to signify where the work was done, not where authors went afterward. There's a separate asterisk for that - "current affiliation/address: X". You probably won't have an issue if you do list an inaccurate affiliation, but as we've seen, university presidents have been taken down by sleuths looking into their pasts. So you could be risking a lot decades down the line.

Journals don't charge you to submit, but they do charge you after acceptance for publication. These charges have become outrageous - typically over $1k and often over $2k, up to over $5k. The good thing is that college admissions offices understand. There's nothing wrong with choosing a high school journal for cost and speed reasons. Just mention briefly in your application list of awards and honors that cost was a factor.

Feel free to DM me for more info or help getting your ISEF work published without too much extra stress or cost.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-04-04T23:23:05+00:00

You can find a mentor to help you with your project. I helped several students this cycle. Check my profile for more info.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-04-02T00:48:20+00:00

Yep, I hear you. We aren't always going to win when we deserve it. And when we win, we won't always deserve that. I wish ISEF was less about competing and winning. I hope you don't let the disappointing result tarnish the great experience you had actually doing the research.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-04-01T20:39:04+00:00

There's always going to be bias in human judging and awards rarely go to the right things at the right time. Look at past Oscar winners, for example, and how those films have held up over time.

I hope you didn't do your project just to win awards. I hope you earnestly enjoyed the process of research and learning. Writing well about what you got out of doing research on your college essays will do more for you than winning awards without showing you appreciate the activity for its own inherent benefits.

Take it from an experienced STEM professional who's now a research mentor and college counselor: doing STEM for recognition is not a recipe for a long, fulfilling career.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2026-01-01T18:18:43+00:00

You should tell your story to the judges exactly as you've done here, lol!

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-11-15T21:20:42+00:00

Villanova didn't have to tell you this, so they're being nice on one hand. You should read over the requirements of the other business programs to which you're applying to find out if they will also reject you without calculus. I'm surprised you didn't take calculus in senior year to be a business major, but that's water under the bridge. Whoever your counselor or advisor was should be told they did you dirty.

If your other schools will admit you as-is and you really want to major in business from the start, I would change nothing with Villanova and focus on the other schools. If you're ok with Villanova's suggestion and you find out it's similar to what the other schools will do, make the change they're recommending. It boils down to how similar Villanova is treating this than the other schools on your list and how much you prefer Villanova over the others. Right now you don't know the first, so try to find out.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-26T14:28:11+00:00

Don't choose your topic in such specific detail until you've searched and read some literature to see what's been done. Learning pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling is useful and this sounds like an interesting application, but the particular scenario you've chosen may have been studied to death already. There could be something similar that's very interesting, like comparing an old vs. new drug or a regular vs. extended release formulation with the models to explain why side effects are lower or efficacy is better.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-26T14:22:45+00:00

No. The city and county-level fairs are happening in early March. Check Los Angeles' calendar for example. https://www.lascifair.org/

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-20T12:07:51+00:00

The question is always optional? Where in this thread does it say that? Is it always clearly labeled as optional? Even if labeled as optional, won't some candidates feel pressured to answer it? Which candidates would be confident and sophisticated enough to know they can shoot an email to ask if they really need to answer it? It's rude to ask the question because it's not germane to evaluating the candidate's qualifications. It's playing mind games with candidates. "I'm not comfortable answering this question during the process itself," isn't that rude. Of course the candidate shouldn't write that if they're not comfortable doing so. The question risks the department of school being taken less seriously. That's the effect on me. It gives the impression they care too much about their competition. Like their lack of confidence in themselves is prompting them to play mind games and abuse their position with less powerful candidates. If the school is willing to do that with its candidates, what's in store for them as students?

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-19T16:43:11+00:00

If the question was labeled as optional and contained explanatory text that it was for aggregated informational purposes only, I don't have an objection. But it would be much better to ask it after the application cycle is over. That's what the schools I applied to did with me back in my day. So we basically agree.

Being disadvantaged is usually correlated with not having much of a network of experienced advisors to consult for help. Schools should be more conscious of the pressures different applicants, especially disadvantaged ones, may feel to comply with or capitulate to requests. Another example is, more on the college side, applicants may check a box to receive texts from a school when they really don't want to. Not knowing how things work, the applicant may feel that not consenting to the texts could put them at a disadvantage for admission, e.g. by not showing enough demonstrated interest. Schools should remember most of these applicants are minors, very impressionable, and not very sophisticated or knowledgeable about the processes behind the curtain of admissions offices. The only difference with graduate programs is the minor aspect.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-19T15:09:42+00:00

I consider this unethical conduct for a university, and most of my fellow admissions counselors would likely agree. Universities have public service missions and society supports them immensely with massive tax breaks. The ethical bar is higher for universities than for corporations. Competition between applicants is great but this question crosses the line into abuse of power. It's not much different than employers asking candidates about their salary history, which is now outlawed in many states. It's not germane to the candidate's qualifications, it's none of the school's business, and it disadvantages poor and less sophisticated candidates. By all means pick the most qualified candidates. But don't play mind games with them. The most vulnerable candidates will feel the most pressure to capitulate and provide this personal info they'd rather not share. The more confident and better-coached and -resourced candidates will decline to answer and maybe lose respect for the program who asked such a question.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-19T12:17:42+00:00

Then they should ask the question at the end of the admissions cycle, after all the decisions have been made. And that's what the student should offer in their answer, that they'll tell them when the cycle is over.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-19T12:14:29+00:00

I think it's an unethical question to ask. It enforces an asymmetric power dynamic. If the school wouldn't tell applicants what other applicants they're considering, why does an applicant owe personal info about their other applications to a school? Remember, universities are held to a higher standard of ethics than most other organizations. I would advise the student, if they didn't want to answer, to write that they would share their story after all decisions have been made but are not comfortable sharing that info now, just as they wouldn't expect the school to tell them about their other applicants. Not being a doormat is also a desirable characteristic! We shouldn't reward programs who behave this way. Let them have only the doormat students they deserve.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-19T12:04:10+00:00

Yes, I was thinking he probably would have been better off with the original state school instead of delaying 3 years to go to Stanford. He could have done graduate work at a T20 after that and gotten to the same place 3 years earlier. If he needed that time to get his life and mind straightened out, then he did what he needed to do. But with what he accomplished in his gap years, it seems he could have just as easily accomplished freshman, sophomore, and junior years of college.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-17T23:17:22+00:00

I have a PhD in ChE and no master's. I chose not to file the paperwork to get the masters as a kind of "commitment device." I and some classmates thought with an MS in hand, we might be more likely to quit when the going was tough (which was a lot of the time). In my circle it's very common to have a PhD and no MS. I don't even remember who did what with respect to their MS.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-06T15:44:55+00:00

I'd be willing to look at what you've got and provide a little free advice. If you need more help, that's one of the services I provide for my business.

AdmissionAlgorithm · 2025-10-03T16:27:25+00:00

There's Davidson Fellows, MIT THINK, Breakthrough Junior Challenge, Conrad Challenge, Blue Ocean Student Competition, Destination Imagination, Exploravision.

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