Science Fair Guides · Mentors
How to get a scientist
to help with your project.
Almost every researcher I know would happily give twenty minutes to a teenager who asked well. Almost none of them are ever asked well. The gap between those two sentences is where this guide lives: how to find the right person, what to say, what to ask for, and what to do with the silence that most of your emails will get back. None of it requires knowing anybody.
← Back to the Science Fair Idea LabWhy They Say Yes
Silence is volume,
not a verdict.
Here is the thing nobody tells you at 15: researchers are not a closed guild. Most of them got into science because a specific adult once took them seriously, and they are unusually sentimental about paying that back. A good student email is also flattering in a way that grant reporting and reviewer three are not — somebody read the paper for its own sake.
So why do most student emails vanish? Volume. An academic’s inbox routinely runs past a hundred messages a day, most of them with deadlines attached. Anything with no deadline slides down the list until it is off the first screen, and off the first screen is functionally deleted. Nothing in that process is about you, your school, your grades or your idea. Reading a non-reply as a judgement is the single most common way students talk themselves out of a project that was fine.
Which means the whole problem is one of design, not worthiness. You are competing for about eight seconds of attention against everything else in that inbox, and you win it by being specific, short, and easy to say yes to. That is it. That is the entire method.
Finding The Person
Local and specific beats
famous and vague.
The instinct is to email the biggest name in the field. Resist it. The person whose face is on a magazine cover has an assistant, a filtered inbox and a talk in Singapore on Thursday. The person you want published a solid paper on your exact question eighteen months ago at a university two hours away and has never once been asked about it by a stranger.
Give yourself an evening and build a list of fifteen to twenty names before you write a single email. Doing the search and the writing on separate days stops you from lowering your standard for the email just because you found somebody.
- 01Search your question, not your topic — On Google Scholar, search the phrasing you would use in your method — river microplastic net mesh recovery, not microplastics. Set the year filter to the last five years. The authors of those papers are your list.
- 02Follow the citation web — Connected Papers builds a visual map of what a paper is related to, which surfaces the smaller labs working near your question that a plain search buries under review articles.
- 03Then go local — Open the chemistry, physics, biology or engineering staff pages of every university within a few hours of you and read the research summaries. Proximity matters enormously: an instrument you can physically visit is worth more than advice from anywhere on earth.
- 04Prefer postdocs and new lecturers — Early-career researchers reply more, have more time, and are usually the ones who actually ran the experiment described in the paper. A group's website normally lists them under people.
- 05Get the real email address — The corresponding author's email is printed on the first page of nearly every paper. That is a better address than a generic departmental contact form, which nobody reads.
- 06Read one paper before writing — Unpaywall finds legal free versions of paywalled papers, and most authors will send you a PDF if you ask. Keep everything in Zotero from the start so your references are already done.
Useful tools, all free: Google Scholar, Connected Papers, Unpaywall and Zotero. Half an hour with those four will get you further than a week of asking around.
The Email
One screen. One ask.
One reason it is them.
Here is a complete example. The names and the paper in it are invented, but the shape is exactly what I would send today. It is 190 words, which is about the longest an unsolicited email can be and still get read on a phone between meetings.
Subject: Transition Year student — one question about your 2023 river microplastic sampling method
Dear Dr Keane,
I am 16 and in Transition Year at a secondary school in west Cork. I am building a project for the Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition on how much microplastic the Ilen carries into the estuary in the two days after heavy rain.
I read your 2023 paper on net mesh size and particle recovery in freshwater. Table 2 is the reason I am writing: you recovered roughly 60% fewer fibres with a 300 µm net than with a 100 µm net, which is much larger than I expected. I am sampling with a 300 µm plankton net because it is what my school has, so if that gap holds in a river with a strong current, most of what I am counting will be the fraction the net happens to keep.
My question is one thing: in your judgement, is a 300 µm net still worth using for a relative comparison between rain events, as long as I never claim an absolute concentration? I would take twenty minutes on a call, or three lines by email, whichever is easier.
If you are too busy, that is completely fine and I will not follow up more than once. My science teacher, Ms Doyle, is copied here and knows I am writing to you.
Thank you for your time,
[Your name] — [School], Co. Cork, Ireland
Why each line is there
The subject line names who you are and what the email is about
A researcher decides in the inbox list, before opening anything. Subject lines like Question or Science project help me look like everything else they delete. Naming a specific paper of theirs signals that this is not a mass mail-out, which is the single biggest reason student emails get ignored.
One line on who you are, with an age and a place
They need to calibrate. A 16-year-old in west Cork asking about river sampling gets a different, warmer answer than an anonymous person asking the same thing. Do not pad this: two lines of biography is one line too many, and nobody needs your grades.
One line on what you are actually doing
Concrete enough that they can picture it — a river, a time window, a measurement. Compare that with I am doing a project on pollution, which tells them nothing and gives them nothing to react to. If a researcher cannot picture your experiment, they cannot help with it.
Evidence you read their actual work
This is the paragraph that does the work. Not I found your research fascinating, which anyone can write without opening a PDF, but a specific table, a specific number, and why it matters to your design. Researchers are used to being cited and unused to being read. Getting to a real detail takes maybe forty minutes of your evening and it is the difference between a reply and silence.
A single concrete ask, sized in minutes
One question, answerable from expertise they already have, with a time cost attached. Twenty minutes is a decision someone can make in the ten seconds they are giving your email. Can you mentor me is an open-ended commitment of unknown length, so the safe answer is no answer.
An easy out, stated first by you
Saying no to a teenager feels bad, and people avoid things that feel bad by leaving the message unopened for three weeks. Giving them permission in advance removes the guilt, and — counter-intuitively — raises your reply rate. It also tells them you will not become an obligation.
An adult named and copied
You are a minor writing to a stranger. Copying a teacher or parent makes the exchange visible, protects both sides, and quietly signals to the researcher that this is a legitimate school project rather than something unsupervised. Many university outreach policies require it anyway.
Run the draft through Hemingway Editor before sending. Anything it marks as very hard to read is a sentence you wrote to sound clever, and sounding clever is not what is being assessed here.
The Ask
Ask for a Tuesday,
not a relationship.
The word mentor is the problem. To you it means someone who occasionally answers a question. To a researcher deciding in eight seconds, it means an open-ended commitment of unknown length, and the safe response to an unknown commitment is to not reply at all. Ask instead for something with edges — a length, a quantity, an afternoon.
Answerable
Twenty minutes on a call to sanity-check my method before I start.
Unanswerable
Would you be willing to mentor me?
Answerable
Could I have 50 mL of the surfactant you used, or the supplier and catalogue number?
Unanswerable
Could I use your lab?
Answerable
Could I use the FTIR for one afternoon, with your technician supervising?
Unanswerable
Can I do my project in your group?
Answerable
Would you read one page — my method section — and tell me the biggest flaw?
Unanswerable
Any advice you have would be amazing.
Answerable
Is there a public dataset in this area you would trust for a student project?
Unanswerable
Where can I find data?
The small ask is not a trick to smuggle in a big one. It is genuinely all you need at the start — and in practice it grows on its own. A twenty-minute call where you turn up prepared very often ends with the other person offering something you would never have dared request, because they have now met you and the risk has gone out of it. Every piece of lab help I got as a teenager started as one question about one number.
When It Goes Wrong
The email I actually sent,
eleven times.
I am not guessing at what a bad version looks like. At 16 I sent something close to this to about a dozen people and got nothing back, and I concluded from that silence that scientists did not talk to schoolkids. What was actually true is that I had written an email nobody could act on.
What I sent
“Subject: Science project. Dear Professor, I am a student in Ireland and I am very interested in your research on plastics, which I found fascinating. I am doing a project about microplastics in water and I would love any advice you could give me. I am hoping to find a mentor. Please let me know if you can help.”
Nothing here can be answered. There is no question, no measurement, no evidence I opened a paper, and the ask is an unbounded commitment. Any advice you could give means the recipient has to invent the question as well as the answer, and that is real work at the end of a long day.
What fixed it
Reading one paper properly and finding a single number in it that changed what I was going to do. Once I had that, the email wrote itself, because I had an actual question instead of an appetite for help. The reply rate went from zero in eleven to roughly one in six.
The other failure mode is subtler and worse: getting a yes and then going quiet. I did that once too, out of embarrassment when my results came out messy — and messy results were exactly what that person could have explained.
The Numbers
Send twenty.
Expect two.
Fifteen to twenty emails is a normal campaign, and one to four replies from that is a normal outcome. If you send three and stop, you have not tested anything — you have just had a small sample. Jack Andraka’s ISEF-winning pancreatic cancer work famously followed roughly two hundred rejections and a single acceptance, and that one yes was enough. The ratio is the job, not a sign that something is wrong.
Send in batches of five over a couple of weeks rather than twenty in one night. You will learn something from the first batch — usually that your ask was still too big — and you can fix it before spending the rest of your list. Keep a simple spreadsheet: name, institution, the paper you read, date sent, date to follow up.
Then follow up exactly once, after two weeks, in the same thread. Three sentences: the ask again in one line, one new thing that has happened since (a preliminary number works beautifully), and an explicit line saying this is the last email you will send. A polite single follow-up converts a meaningful share of silences, because the first message was never rejected — it was buried. A second follow-up converts almost nothing and costs you the goodwill of the first.
The follow-up, in full
“Dear Dr Keane, I know how busy term is, so this is my only follow-up. Since I wrote, I have run six sampling days and the post-rain counts are about three times the dry-day counts, which makes the mesh question above matter more, not less. If twenty minutes is possible in the next month I would be very grateful; if not, thank you all the same and I will not write again.”
After The Yes
Be the student they
mention to a colleague.
Getting the yes is the hard part, and it is also the part students prepare for. What follows decides whether one conversation becomes a year of help, and it comes down to being cheap to help — low friction, well prepared, never a source of guilt.
Come with three questions written down
Not a general chat. Send them the day before so the researcher can think, or look something up, instead of improvising.
Be ruthless about time
If you asked for twenty minutes, start closing at eighteen. Ending early is the strongest signal that a second conversation will also be short.
Do the reading they suggest, and say so
If they name a paper, read it and mention one specific thing about it next time. The fastest way to lose a mentor is to ask them something they already told you.
Send a short update every two or three weeks
Five sentences: what you did, what the data look like, what you are stuck on, what is next. Nobody has ever resented a five-sentence update. Plenty have quietly disengaged from silence.
Tell them when it fails
The bad results are the interesting part to a researcher, and hiding them wastes the one person who could tell you why the assay drifted.
Credit them properly, and check first
Ask how they want to be acknowledged, and confirm what your competition requires you to declare about outside help. Then send them a photo from the fair. It costs nothing and it is the reason they say yes to the next student.
One boundary worth stating out loud: the project has to stay yours. A mentor can advise on a method, lend an instrument or challenge your reasoning, but if they design the experiment or analyse the data for you, both the science and your entry are compromised. Most fairs require you to declare exactly what help you received and where the work was done — check the Society for Science ISEF rules for what your fair expects, and read our safety and ethics guide before any work happens in a regulated setting. Judges do not penalise good mentorship. They penalise unclear authorship.
Doing This Safely
You are a minor
emailing strangers.
The overwhelming majority of researchers are exactly who they appear to be, and this is a normal thing to do. It still deserves the same care as anything else that puts a teenager in contact with adults they have never met. None of the following will make you look less serious — a real scientist expects it.
- ·Use a school email address, and copy a teacher or parent on the first message in every new thread.
- ·Keep the conversation on email or a scheduled video call. There is no reason to move to a private messaging app.
- ·Never share your home address, your timetable, or a photo that identifies where you are.
- ·Meet at the university, during working hours, with a teacher or parent present — never one to one somewhere else.
- ·Check the person is who they say: their name should appear on a real departmental staff page you found yourself, not just in their signature.
- ·If anyone asks you to drop the adult from the thread, keep something secret, or move somewhere private, stop and tell your teacher. That request is the signal, on its own.
Having an adult in the loop is also just practically better. A teacher who can see the thread can tell you when an offer is unusually generous, help you negotiate lab access with a school risk assessment attached, and sign the forms your competition will eventually demand. Universities have safeguarding policies for contact with minors, and copying a teacher makes the researcher’s side of that easy too.
If Nobody Replies
Doors that are
already open.
If twenty emails produce nothing, widen the net rather than lowering the standard of the email. These routes all reach real scientists, and several of them reach people whose actual job is to help you.
Route 01
Your own science teacher, asked properly
The most under-used mentor in the building. Ask for a specific half hour on a specific problem, not general supervision — the difference in what you get back is enormous. Teachers also know which local technician can fix your rig.
Route 02
The university outreach or public engagement office
Nearly every university has one, and its entire job is to connect schools with researchers. They can route a request to a person who has already volunteered, which beats cold-emailing someone who has not. Search the university name plus schools outreach.
Route 03
Technicians, PhD students and postdocs
A second-year PhD student runs the instrument, remembers being 17, and has far more free time than the professor whose name is on the paper. They are also the people who actually know why your measurement is noisy.
Route 04
Online communities
Reddit's r/labrats and r/AskScience, and field-specific forums, will answer a well-posed method question from a student remarkably often. Post the specific problem with your numbers, not a request for a mentor.
Route 05
Citizen science projects
Zooniverse and similar platforms put you inside a real research effort with real data and real scientists in the discussion boards. It is a slower route to a person, but the relationship starts with you having already contributed something.
Route 06
Science Buddies and structured programmes
Science Buddies runs a free Ask an Expert forum staffed by volunteer scientists, which exists precisely for this. Local summer research programmes at nearby universities are worth applying to even if you think you are too young.
Two of those have front doors you can use tonight: Science Buddies Ask an Expert and Zooniverse. And it is worth saying plainly: a mentor is a multiplier, not a requirement. My first three projects had none, and the Google Science Fair one began with a magnet, a bottle of oil and a kitchen table. If nobody replies this month, run the experiment anyway. Having data changes the email completely — people who ignore a request for advice will very often answer a question attached to a number you measured yourself.
Common Questions
What students ask me
about asking.
How do I email a scientist to help with my science fair project?
Write a short email with five parts: a subject line naming a specific paper of theirs, one line on who you are and how old you are, one line on what you are measuring, a paragraph proving you read their actual work, and a single concrete ask with a time cost attached. Finish by giving them an easy way to say no and copy a teacher or parent. The whole thing should fit on one phone screen — roughly 150 to 200 words.
Why do scientists not reply to student emails?
Almost always volume, not judgement of you. A working academic can receive well over a hundred emails a day, and anything that does not have a deadline attached slides down the pile until it disappears. Silence carries no information about your project or your worth, which is why the correct response to it is to send the next email rather than to reconsider your idea.
How many scientists should I email?
Fifteen to twenty is a normal, healthy number, and you should expect somewhere between one and four replies. Jack Andraka's ISEF-winning pancreatic cancer work famously came after roughly two hundred rejections and a single acceptance, which is the ratio nobody tells students in advance. Write the list of names first, then send in batches of five over two weeks, so that no single non-reply feels like the answer.
What should I ask a scientist for?
Ask for one small, specific, bounded thing: twenty minutes on a call, one reagent, an afternoon on an instrument with supervision, or feedback on a single page of your method. Vague requests like will you mentor me ask someone to commit an unknown amount of time for an unknown period, and the safe answer to that is no answer. Small asks also tend to grow on their own once someone is already interested in what you are doing.
Is it safe for a student to email a researcher?
It is, with a few sensible rules: use a school email address rather than a personal one, copy a teacher or parent on the first message, keep the conversation on email or a scheduled video call, and never share your home address or agree to meet alone. Any legitimate researcher will expect a minor's contact to be supervised and will not find it strange. If someone asks you to move to a private channel or to drop the adult from the thread, stop and tell your teacher.
What do I do if no scientist replies?
Widen the net rather than lowering the standard of the email. Your own science teacher, a university outreach office, PhD students and technicians rather than professors, Reddit's r/labrats, Science Buddies' Ask an Expert forum and citizen-science platforms all reach real scientists through doors that are already open. Plenty of extremely good projects, including my own first three, ran with no mentor at all.
Where To Go Next
Keep going.
The free tool that builds a project around your interests and equipment — or stress-tests the idea you already have.
Before anyone lets you near a lab: approval has to come first, and retroactive does not count.
Section by section, including how to acknowledge help without blurring whose project it is.
Work out how many replicates you need before you ask anyone for instrument time.
The thing I wish someone had told me at 16 is that the wall is imaginary. There is no gate, no permission, no qualification you are missing — there is an inbox, and a person in it who would genuinely like to be useful and is very busy. Write the specific email. Send it twenty times. Somebody will say yes, and that conversation will change what you think is possible faster than any result you get.
— Fionn
Google Science Fair Global Grand Prize, 2019
Science Fair Guides · Idea Lab · fionnferreira.com