2022-2023, THE TOP JOURNAL: The Aspiring Scientist

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Conducting research to understand and formulate viable solutions are crucial in saving lives and bettering global communities. Because of our interest and passion for research, we felt an urge to create change in the state of this modern world with our own skills. This year, Ashley Yewon Nam researched ‘Do Synesthetes have a General Advantage in Visual Search and Episodic Memory’. Curious about the famed "sixth "sense", Ashley studied how the neurological phenomena could benefit visual search and episodic memory. Similarly, Hye Jung Shin conducted a peer-survey exploring "the Outcome of the Stroop Effect with Negative, Positive, and Neutral Words". Here, Hye Jung elevated her research by conducting live experiments with her peers. Shee directly gathered and recorded relevant data while exploring the impact of word genres on reaction times. This is just an example of the inquisitive mind that we hope to inspire and develop in high school students. The compiled research does not focus only on health-related studies. Daniel Shin, another curious-minded student, researched ‘Effectiveness of CeO2/Mn3O4 Nanocrystals on Reducing DNA Damage by Space Radiation’, while James Kim wrote a paper on ‘The Correlation Between Brix and Sugar Content in Common Beverages’. Other students researched topics such as ‘Testing Effective De-Icing Agents and Experimental Data for Current Road Salts’, ‘The Effects of Drag on a Home-built Small Paper Airplane', ‘Racism in American Society and its Effects on the Asian Immigrants’, and ‘Predicting a Stock's Price by Creating Multiple Machine Learning Algorithms’. The Top Journal is a peer-reviewed international journal by high school students that uses the social sciences to reflect on learning and teaching in the changing context of education. The journal is heavily dedicated to providing students with mentorship throughout their research and creative activities and providing opportunities to expand their knowledge and insights. Our goal is to encourage, recognize, promote, and reward students’ intellectual activity beyond the classroom while providing a platform for exchanging knowledge and good practice insights. This project began to engage students with the social applications of scientific research and has rapidly grown into a renowned publication with numerous submissions by young authors. As students who came from a science background and then transitioned into the education field, we felt that the opportunities to apply our research to issues of social equity were somewhat lacking, especially when it came to independent research. Many schools offer extracurricular summer learning programs in the hard sciences, but they are often very structured and rarely allow the student to choose their topic of study or research. For this reason, we feel fortunate to have found out about this initiative to showcase student researcher’s individual and creative endeavors in the search for solutions to social issues. The publication of this journal was a laborious, independently driven process in which students personally selected and pursued a research topic of their own choosing. Students were particularly challenged to research a topic that addressed an issue in their lives. To accomplish this, some students even engaged in summer programs at prestigious universities and received mentoring from faculty to refine their projects. Through further mentoring on professional writing and publication standards, we were able to push each submission to achieve its highest quality of research and presentation.