How I Published an Academic Paper in High School
By: Jason Jiang
Tags: High School, Academic Research, Research, Academic Publishing, High School Research

Hey guys! Just FYI, this is my first blog post ever on Medium.

Hope you are all doing well. Please follow me, give some claps, and leave a comment if you find this useful or find me interesting. If not, that’s all good too, thanks for sticking around. Currently, I plan on writing about school, learning, life experiences, workouts, and coding.

I’m actually currently a freshman in college and just graduated high school in the class of 2020. It was around the summer after my sophomore year when I decided to get into research. It was quite easy to send emails to various professors since a lot of professors’ emails were public on the school’s websites. Side note: it was easier for professors to accept high schoolers from our school into their research due to the reputation of the school and previous students working in research. I was quite lucky that the professor I wanted to work with responded, but don’t get discouraged if professors do ghost you. If they happen to do so, you can always meet them during their office hours since they can’t ghost you in person haha.

For the first semester of my junior year, I ended up not doing any research. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it, but it was rather that my professor didn’t really have a project in mind for me and I wasn’t particularly motivated for research. It was not until towards the end of the first semester when I decided to go after research again.

I met with my professor in his office one morning and he agreed to get me on a project with social media and its correlation to stock prices. At first, I tried working on Twitter and found a web scraper that I could use which would give me Tweet data when entered a time frame and keywords. Anyways, I won’t bore you with the details but I remember working on this throughout the second semester and summer after junior year. In particular, with my professor, I was quite frustrated that he didn’t do any of the actual work but more acted as a mentor for me. Looking back, I’m actually glad that happened because you get to learn about the research project from start to end and also have 100% say in the direction of the project.

In the beginning, there were actually two other undergrads that worked with me. I thought they were going to provide valuable opinions and help with the research project. Soon after, they started not replying to emails and no longer came to meetings, and I was back alone working with my professor. A lot of people will come and go and I hope you will be the one that sticks throughout the highs and lows. Research like any other project is a commitment. Having the discipline to commit is rewarding since you can look back and be proud of something you put your time and energy into. It’s honestly no different from working out: you have to be consistent and trust your gut that it’ll work out.

I think a lot of high schoolers are doing research just for college apps or trying to do it to publish a paper. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this mindset because after all, nobody wants to work hard for something without getting something back. I will say this though.

Research is more than just a publication. It’s about letting yourself go to explore new ideas nobody has thought of before and feeling the excitement when you do hop over the challenges. In life, to do most things well, you have to give it you’re all. Even if you don’t succeed, you can look back later without regret knowing that you’ve done everything in your control to get it done.

I honestly didn’t even think I was going to publish a paper because I didn’t have any significant results even after working on it for a semester and a summer. Fortunately, one day at a library, I decided last minute to change the direction of my research. I ran a test and saw that this time, the accuracy was a lot better. During the next few months, one thing led to another, and I finished writing the paper following ACM guidelines. My professor recommended me a conference to apply to and I ended up getting it reviewed and published.

The highlight of this post isn’t to show you how I got my paper published TBH. If you really wanted to get a paper published, you can just find a suitable LATEX format and write a paper based on a pet project. Afterward, find a conference that accepts most papers because they charge a conference fee and you can get it published.

What I do want you to know is that the skills and discipline from research are not something school can teach you but you have to discover yourself. When you’re in high school, you’re gonna be tunnel-visioned about college, but know that there are so many things life has to offer outside of college and work. What are you waiting for? Start today!

Best,

Jason

P.S: If you have any questions or want to contact me my email is jasonjiang09@gmail.com