About Us
Mission
Mission Statement
ENVISION Research Competition is an accessible scientific research experience for female and genderqueer high school students.
About the Competition
ENVISION Research Competition is an annual international research competition for female and genderqueer high school students interested in STEM. Students work individually or in groups of up to 4 members to write a formal research proposal. Besides monetary awards, participating in ENVISION offers numerous benefits including practicing formal scientific writing, literature review, and teamwork and collaboration.
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ENVISION transforms high school research
Research experience is crucial to a large variety of professions, ranging from doctor to data scientist. However, access to these experiences is limited, especially for high school students. Many students do not have the money or time required to access labs, equipment, and mentors for research. ENVISION strives to help bridge this gap—when students write an entry for ENVISION, they are planning a research project start to finish, complete from ideation to procedure, which allows them to gain experience in the meticulous process of research.
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ENVISION encourages innovation without limits
Because ENVISION only requires the proposal for a research project and not the complete project, ENVISION participants are able to work with projects and topics which would otherwise be financially or technically out of their reach. Participation in ENVISION does not require scientific equipment, financial resources, or mentorship. Students are encouraged to use their imagination and open access resources to formulate a project in any STEM or interdisciplinary subject of their interest.
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ENVISION teaches proposal writing
What is proposal writing?
In order to acquire funding, scientists must apply for grants. Grants are sums of money donated to various scientific communities for the purpose of furthering science. These grants are awarded to the winning scientist so that that scientist may conduct their study.
A research proposal is the main component of a grant application. The proposal is scientific literature that attempts to convince the grant review board that the board should give the grant to them.
First, the proposal must show that the proposed study will have a large positive impact on the world if it is conducted successfully. This means that the research either targets a large, life-altering issue affecting a small portion of the population, or a small issue affecting a large population. Of course, this is only relative to the other applicants for the grant.
Second, the proposal must show that the proposed study is feasible, and will give results if the scientist acquires proper resources. Therefore, the scientist must use current scientific studies to back up his decisions throughout the proposal.
Why is it important?
Learning proposal writing, especially in high school, is important for numerous reasons.
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Proposal writing is a key skill to successfully applying to grants and attaining funding to conduct research as a scientist. Therefore, without understanding how to write proposals, scientists will neither have the opportunity or resources to conduct any research.
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Proposal writing is almost never taught. Instead, scientists learn through trial and error, which means they almost always start writing their first proposal when they need a grant. And, of course, this means that they will make many mistakes along the way, and most likely miss multiple opportunities they could've won had they learned earlier.
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Writing proposals improves critical planning skills. In order to write a research proposal, scientists must be capable of thoroughly planning their research, expressing what they want to do in a way that seems clear and feasible to the judge and anticipating any and all obstacles they may face. Not only is this skill useful in writing grants, it's also applicable in numerous ways to day-to-day life.
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Proposal writing practices comprehensive literature review. Literature review is the process of looking through previously published scientific literature to gain insights which may support your proposal. It is a unique skill set which combines the ability to comb through information quickly and the ability to use literature sources. Not only is this useful in proposal-writing, this skill is often also required to write research papers where collecting background information frequently involves literature review.