Senior Attends MIT Research Science Institute

This summer, Avon High School senior Jay Desai joined 100 of the world's brightest at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a science and engineering program called Research Science Institute (RSI). The following is his retelling of the experience with slight edits for this format.

By Jay Desai

Each summer, 100 of the world's most accomplished rising high school seniors (60 domestic and 40 international students) gather at MIT for RSI. RSI is the first free-to-students summer science and engineering program to combine on-campus course work in scientific theory with off-campus work in science and technology research.

My experience in Boston was absolutely incredible. My first week consisted of college-level classes in subjects ranging from the humanities, material chemistry, neurobiology, and computer science. For the rest of the six weeks, I conducted a research project in a computational lab at Harvard Medical School. My work focused on training an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model to predict tuberculosis strain resistance to a variety of drugs; I wrote a 20-page research paper and also presented my work to researchers, mentors, and other students. I'm still continuing my project remotely under my mentor's guidance. Throughout the program, we had daily evening lectures given by a variety of people, including a Nobel laureate, startup founders, quant researchers, and more.

I loved living on MIT campus and was able to explore a lot of the city on weekend outings. We travelled to the local Harbor Islands, held a 4th of July party, and cooked food to celebrate everybody’s heritage on International Night. I even performed a Bollywood dance routine with my Indian friends in the program! I met so many amazing people, both students and researchers. I'm truly very grateful to have been a part of this experience and to join the RSI family.

I was the only student representing Indiana, and I’m honored to have represented Avon High School and Avon Community School Corporation in this prestigious program.