I went to a Magnet high school (http://mbhs.edu/departments/magnet/) (a public school that takes in the top 100 students from the county to teach them an advanced curriculum) and part of the requirements for earning a Magnet diploma was to do a Senior Research Project (SRP) that sounds very much like ASR. To find a mentor (I wanted to do theoretical computer science, I had done some independent research on graph theory in my own time) I emailed a professor at the University of Maryland and worked over my 11th grade summer with him. I came up with a result, not important enough to get published, but it won me this award: http://www.sciserv.org/sts/64sts/Forbes.asp and got me into MIT.
For advanced topics such as cryptography the best bet is the local university. There are also a bunch of government facilities out there that do research. Some of the best places (mostly in the DC area, however) are the NSA (http://www.nsa.gov/careers/students_1.cfm) and NIST (http://csrc.nist.gov/) (NIST can offer housing, btw). There is also a great program for high school juniors at MIT or Caltech (no cost): http://www.cee.org/rsi/index.shtml .
Just to show that high-school cryptography research is possible: http://www.sciserv.org/sts/60sts/Dunn.asp . This guy is the older brother of one of my friends (both who went to the same high school program as I) and I believe he did his research at NIST.
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I went to a Magnet high school (http://mbhs.edu/departments/magnet/) (a public school that takes in the top 100 students from the county to teach them an advanced curriculum) and part of the requirements for earning a Magnet diploma was to do a Senior Research Project (SRP) that sounds very much like ASR. To find a mentor (I wanted to do theoretical computer science, I had done some independent research on graph theory in my own time) I emailed a professor at the University of Maryland and worked over my 11th grade summer with him. I came up with a result, not important enough to get published, but it won me this award: http://www.sciserv.org/sts/64sts/Forbes.asp and got me into MIT.
For advanced topics such as cryptography the best bet is the local university. There are also a bunch of government facilities out there that do research. Some of the best places (mostly in the DC area, however) are the NSA (http://www.nsa.gov/careers/students_1.cfm) and NIST (http://csrc.nist.gov/) (NIST can offer housing, btw). There is also a great program for high school juniors at MIT or Caltech (no cost): http://www.cee.org/rsi/index.shtml .
Just to show that high-school cryptography research is possible: http://www.sciserv.org/sts/60sts/Dunn.asp . This guy is the older brother of one of my friends (both who went to the same high school program as I) and I believe he did his research at NIST.
-Michael Forbes