Want to Be an Intel Finalist? You Need the Right Mentor / N.Y. teen wins science competition and $100K college scholarship

EVERYONE asks, how do they do it? Year after year, Ward Melville is one of the leading high schools in the nation for producing top science research projects in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition.

This year Ward Melville, a suburban Long Island public school, had 12 semifinalist winners out of 300 nationally, second only to Montgomery Blair High in Silver Springs, Md., which had 13. In the seven years since Intel took over sponsorship from Westinghouse, Ward Melville ranks third nationally, with 68 semifinalists. The only two ahead are Stuyvesant in New York City (94) which requires an exam for admissions; and Montgomery Blair (89) which has a selective-admissions science program.

How does Ward Melville, a regular public school, do it? Partly, it’s a well-to-do district with lots of parents who are doctors and other scientists. They’ve made research a top priority, naming a former university professor, Dr. George Baldo, to run the program. In 1999, the school doubled the program’s size to 130 students and budgeted for a second full-time teaching slot.

The school subscribes to an online service giving students unlimited access to the latest research papers. Dr. Baldo’s program has its own $4,000 printer that can produce an entire science fair poster board in a single 42-inch-wide sheet, and a $30,000 budget to pay travel expenses to nine science fairs a year. "We don’t worry about raffling off a case of soda to buy materials," says Dr. Baldo.

He has a large enough staff to make sure all 38 pages of the Intel international science and engineering fair application get filled out correctly by the 25 students going. "I finally found the two forms you kept asking me for," Tony Li, a student, told Dr. Baldo the other day. "They were under a couch."

But none of these are the main reason Ward Melville excels. High school students cannot do research at this level without adult mentors – often a university professor plus a team of grad students – to pick a topic that will break new ground, yet be manageable, and to supervise them at every step.

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/09/education/09education.html

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N.Y. teen wins science competition

A 17-year-old New York City boy won a national science competition Tuesday for creating a sensor that detects exposure to toxic agents such as nerve gas.

David Bauer, a senior at Hunter College High School, earned a $100,000 college scholarship in the 2005 Intel Science Talent Search. He developed a way for rapidly detecting exposure to biochemical agents, with hopes that his discovery could be a lifesaver.

Full Story: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2005-03-16-intel-talent-search_x.htm