How to find research opportunities in high school

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office valued high school research for a simple reason: it is what faculty spend their lives doing, and what undergraduates there will be asked to do. Of everything a student can pursue outside class, it may be the most persuasive to a selective college, because it shows academic energy at full heat, and because most high school students never attempt it, the few who do stand out.

The trouble is getting a foot in the door. The typical student writes one hopeful email to one lab, hears nothing back, and concludes that research belongs to students with connections, and a family can lose a year that way. The students who end up with real work on the page were rarely better connected; they treated the search as a ladder, trying each rung until one held, and they knew the order of the rungs.