Xref: utzoo bionet.general:1075 sci.bio:3755 sci.research:1445 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!haven!adm!cmcl2!phri!news From: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: bionet.general,sci.bio,sci.research Subject: Need idea for Westinghouse project Message-ID: <1990Oct29.222305.9923@phri.nyu.edu> Date: 29 Oct 90 22:23:05 GMT Sender: news@phri.nyu.edu (News System) Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City Lines: 35 A high school junior just introduced himself to me, looking for a mentor for a Westinghouse project. It sounds like what he wants to do is something in computational biology. He mentioned things like RNA folding and molecular modelling. He's just learning C and is taking a course which I think he said is called Biological Research but sounds like it's really "Let's Do a Westinghouse Project, 3 credits per semester, by permission of the instructor" I'm not sure how to approach this. From the 3 minutes I got to talk to him, he seems pretty bright, but I'm not sure how serious a project even a really smart high school junior can be expected to tackle in a year's worth of effort. When I was a junior or senior in high school, a really cool computer project was writing Hunt The Wumpus in BASIC; clearly that's not going to win any Westinghouse awards. Didn't I hear somewhere that Ray Lau wrote StuffIt for the Mac while he was in high school? Have things changed that much in 15 years, or is Ray just a lot smarter than me? I certainly don't want to just think up a year's worth of busywork for him to do, but I also don't want to end up with a project that's too big or too hard to get a handle on. I'm not even sure how much of the planning I'm supposed to be doing anyway; I always look at the projects Westinghouse winners do and think, "no way did a high school kid conceive, plan and excecute that on his own" and don't want that to happen here. Any ideas on how I should deal with this? I guess the big question is, it is reasonable to expect that a kid just learning C now could possibly, in a year from now, produce some useful, impressive, or just plain interesting body of work in computational biology? -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "Arcane? Did you say arcane? It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"