I THINK it’s time for a guest blog! by Kate R. '14

This post comes to you from my friend Iris Xu, ’14, a longtime friend who’s gotten pretty involved with MIT THINK. She asked me to let her guest-blog about it, and I figured, hey, science is awesome, MIT is awesome, what’s not to love about the combination? So here it is, *groan*fully punny title and all!

Here’s Iris:

WARNING: There will be shameless promotion of MIT TechFair’s THINK competition in this post.
NOTE: You needn’t have worked in a lab nor done research to enter.

It’s that time of year again—holidays, finals, and high school science competitions! *thumbs up*

For me, it was really awesome getting the chance to work in a lab and to start my own project. I remember how cool I felt when I first told my friends about “mutagenesis” like it was some dirty word. Just kidding…I never told them but I like to pretend that they cared.
But, in all seriousness, starting a project was kind of a milestone for me in high school. It meant that I got to work on something that I got excited just thinking about, and where the time I put in materialized in the form of cool results and a *high-quality* shiny poster display. Science competitions became a really great way to showcase that hard work. But, it wasn’t just that. They became a great opportunity to meet other kids who were just as excited and who cared just as much about their projects.
Of course, I learned how to communicate scientific results and how to develop experiments, and ended up working on the project all the way until MIT began. And in the end, it wasn’t really about the results, but the ideas and work that went into them.

And now for the plug…

Sure, I did a lot of science competitions, but I REALLY, REALLY wish I knew about MIT TechFair’s THINK.
It differs from other competitions in that it is more about innovation and using your resources to implement an idea rather than the results. The categories are:
• Homegrown Proposal The project is conducted in a home environment, with or without professional mentorship.
• Laboratory-Based Proposal The project is conducted in a professional setting, such as a school laboratory or an industrial lab.
• Idea Proposal The project has not been conducted yet, but describes comprehensive steps for implementation.
It’s free to enter, and just some of the awesome prizes include:
• A trip to MIT for the week of Spring Registration for TechFair
• The opportunity to meet a MIT professor/faculty of choice
• Opportunity to network with all the companies at TechFair
• Money and other goodies
For more information, go to http://www.mittechfair.org/think/ .The deadline is December 15.