Taking Your Project Forward

From Stepping Up

How to be Happy

Stepping Up Guide

Section Home Being on Camera: How to Deal with the Media De-stress Therapy: The Zen of Science Fair Dealing with a Loss Getting Yourself Out of Sticky Situations How to Avoid Being a Sore Winner (or Sore Loser) Returning to Canada Wide or ISEF (How Not to Rest on Your Laurels) Taking Your Project Forward Top 10: What We Love About Science Fairs

Okay, so you made it this far. What to do now? If you want to take your work forward, make sure to sit back and rest a bit before jumping ahead again!

General Tips

• Seek Criticism in terms of presentation, detail, and overall quality
• Improve Your Project by exporting the concept to researchers and academics in your field
• Secure Ownership over your ideas and methods -- intellectual property is big business
• Network with others to maximize the intellectual benefits of your project
• Up the Ante and push your project concepts further, draw on the lessons learned at previous fairs

How Do I Take My Project Forward?

Moving up from fair to fair should be seen as a an opportunity to upgrade and update what you already have. In the world of computer science, this is called stepwise refinement.

This is your chance to soften the rough edges, tweak the numbers to higher precision and accuracy, and most importantly -- this is your chance to change the delivery and level of your content. This means that an experimental life science project may be improved by taking more samples; or in the case of an engineering project, improvements may be by means of more efficient algorithms. There's always room for improvement because perfection is simply a theoretical yield concept in itself.

First off, you need to identify what works and what doesn't work in your project.

Work to enhance the strong points of your project by doing more research, find relevant academic documents, interview experts, and present your current work in progress to others in your field. At the same time, fix the not-so-stellar parts by (a) removing them, or (b) find out if the poor components can be salvaged. Use your judgement.

Secondly, speak to teachers and others to maximize on networking opportunities. They might be able to lead you to more useful contacts. Also, consider using the internet to email researchers. Keep emails short and sweet. People in the "real world" don't have time to read long (and useless) emails.

Spend some time every now and then to email researchers and academics with your short abstract (a few lines). See what they say. You are likely to receive a reply if you make the effort.

Also, make sure your presentation is tip-top and spiffy. It has to look good to sell. You should realize by now that science is business, and that science is the hardest business to sell. This means, your project board must look good, it means you need to make sure your board and your materials speak for you and sell your idea. After all, the judging is about pitching your idea and grading your work.

There are two main components to a project and they are (1) the quality and (2) the level.

Improving the quality is somewhat easier than upgrading the level. Why? Think about it. Quality is central to delivery. Project level is central to depth and difficulty. The competitive arena will engage your project essentially along those two major lines of criticism.

It is up to you to steer your project to improve the quality, and it is also up to you to increase the project level and its depth of study.

These are recommendations. They look and sound relatively simple. But they are not. Enjoy!