Once the deadline has passed for the current cohort, applications are reviewed by our team. We then hold our interview round, and conclude with a decision notification. You can learn more in depth about our process here.
Alumni of the program have shown themselves to be dedicated learners, driven self-starters, and ambitious about pursuing their passions. They are motivated high school students with a drive for discovery and a commitment to excellent work.
Our tuition fee is $12,500. We also offer need-based financial aid which involves a supplementary application portion.
Our research mentors would be happy to write a letter of recommendation (subject to performance). These can be used for college applications, future opportunities, summer programs, etc. We have helped many students land part-time and full-time summer research positions at top universities after successful research publication.
Generally speaking, most high schoolers submit and publish work to 3 different types of venues:
1) high school level venues such as the Journal of Emerging Investigators and YSJ
2) undergraduate-level peer-reviewed venues, such as the Journal of Undergraduate Research
3) postgraduate-level, peer-reviewed venues, such as the IEEE and ACM
Although high school and undergraduate outcomes are a great starting point for high school students, the highest quality of all work gets published in postgraduate, peer-reviewed venues. Only a few high schoolers achieve this each year, making those who do instantly stand out. As such, Echelon Scholars only targets publications like these.
At Echelon Scholars, to achieve our goals of postgraduate-level, peer-reviewed outcomes, we believe students must contribute to the state-of-the-art. Thus, our research opportunities focus on interdisciplinary research where there is at least one element of technical skills used, such as AI/ML, data science, molecular biology, statistics, applied math, and medical research. Our high school students have done research on a huge variety of fields, from cutting-edge biomedical research, to using neural network algorithms to do cash-flow based financial underwriting for credit cards to using data science for tracking animal migration patterns. All original research topics are ultimately chosen by our students after conducting a thorough literature review with their mentors, as is done in top university labs and research institutes - a high standard most summer research programs do not adhere to.
We offer unlimited hours as part of our research program. At Echelon, we aim to align our goals and incentives and work with our high school students all the way from project ideation to research paper submission. This is a primary reason for our small cohorts - unlike a standard summer research program, we do not put a cap or deadline on the help our high school students receive. This unique approach has more than paid off: to date, we have had a 100% success rate.
On average, most students spend 6 months in the program. However, some of our students have published within just 3 months. On the other hand, we have worked with many for over a year for additional applications of their research projects. We truly are an unlimited hour program and work with students until they succeed.
Our focus is on students in high school. At Echelon, believe that a key element to excellence is finding a niche and committing to it. We are deeply committed to empowering diligent, driven high school students to realize a high-level research experience and publish their research papers at the highest level even at their young age.
Absolutely. Our mentors have worked with high school students across the full spectrum of experience - from absolutely no exposure to research, to students who have been through a typical summer research program and published in student-led high school journals. Regardless of your prior knowledge with research projects, we are confident we can get you across the finish line to publishing at a post-graduate, peer-reviewed academic level for the first time.
