This post is about my experience with LSC Partners in Science. It's in New Jersey and as far as I know is only open to New Jersey/NYC students.
My Story:
TL;DR: I was placed into a lab with terrible conditions, supervision and given work to do that barely qualified as research. I was fired for complaining.
I applied to the program listing Computer Science (CS) as my number one choice. I was accepted for CS and given a professor about 2 weeks later. The professor (she was at Stevens Institute of Technology) seemed decent and the program payed money, so I turned down 2 other admissions for research programs to go to this one. At first I was given a few papers to read about CS, and I was super excited. The building she worked in smelled like cigarettes and rotisserie chicken, and I worked in a crappy chair at a conference table in a small, messy room with 13 graduate students. These graduate students all spoke Chinese among themselves at all times, and the one assigned to me would switch to English once or twice a day for me. When I was given my work to do, it turned out those CS papers meant nothing, and that I would actually be implementing algorithms written 10 years ago on Android. My entire project was just rewriting algorithms. I finished it in 4 weeks while slacking off most of the time, and all of these graduate students were BLOWN AWAY that somebody could write code this fast. I asked for a new project, but the professor was constantly out of the office because she spent most of her time chasing funding. Finally, she gave me some old code they had from a paper her lab had already published. My job would be to fix the bugs on an already published piece of software because they were not able to fix them themselves.
At this point I complained to the professor because these graduate students would talk crap about me in Chinese, the work was not interesting, and I had zero prospects of getting published or submitting a science fair project with the stuff I was doing.
Her response was "Get out of my lab, you're not that important."
The program supervisor from LSC called me and told me to never come back to Stevens for my own safety.
After dumping the better part of my summer into this program, I was unemployed and had nothing to show for 6 weeks of work. It was a horrible experience. Only because I had family connections at NJIT was I able to salvage my resume for the summer.
Will this happen to you?
At the end of the summer they held a symposium where everybody showed off their research. Of the 30-40 kids, about 20 did something biology-related, like 7 did something related to CS, and there was a smattering of chemistry, materials science, physics and environmental science. I talked to almost everybody there.
As far as I saw, Biology gives you a pretty good chance of success in the program. Although you can be assigned a mean professor, you'll have work to do all summer and will have something to show for it.
DON'T DO THIS PROGRAM IF YOU WANT TO DO CS RESEARCH
I had a terrible experience, but 2 other kids spent their whole summer making a website for their "CS research," 2 kids spent their whole summer building an "educational game" for their "CS research" and 2 kids actually did something in Computer Vision, but it was literally just running basic OpenCV algorithms (and one of them got fired mid summer like me.)
The smattering of other fields seemed to have good experiences, BUT I heard 3 other bad stories that I would like to recount now:
* This one girl doing Materials Science actually worked in the basement of my building at Stevens. She had asthma and the dust in the basement would give her pretty horrible problems, but her professor did nothing of it.
* This one guys (Environmental Science I think) entire summer research project consisted of pouring motor oil on mussels. The experiment took one week and he spent the rest of the time sitting around because his professor was busy and had nothing else to do.
* This one guy doing physics didn't know calculus yet (I'm not sure why he applied here lol) and he had to spent 2 weeks of his summer learning math. Afterwards, he barely understood the state of the art in quantum mechanics research and basically showed some graphs in MATLAB of stuff he didn't understand at the symposium.
In summary:
Don't be fooled by the money this program pays. There's a sizable chance you'll go through pain worth a lot more than 1000$ (the stipend you get payed.)
If you want to do Computer Science or Physics, don't even waste your time applying; you're wasting your time.
If you're applying for some other area, go to the lab first, speak with the professor, and screen EVERYTHING. Getting placed with a bad research supervisor will literally eat away at your sanity.
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