Ah, the elusive Pioneer Research Program. I first heard about it during a college prep lecture in September 2023, when I first entered BAID. Back then, oblivious as I was of the admissions process, I thought the name was common knowledge, and I was too “out of the loop” to have heard about it.
Then came November 2024, and I applied for Pioneer. It was the first proper program that I had written an application to since I entered high school, at the recommendation of my counselor. Even though the program seemed to have a good reputation among our students and my counselor, I was still a bit skeptical. Pioneer’s marketing was very over-the-top. One day, they sent a sales representative to our school to hold a lecture. Along with the lecture was a small leaflet, reprinting an article boasting about how good Pioneer is and how all other high school research programs are huge scams. A few days later, I attended an admissions information session, and it was the same boasting of how good the program is. Surprisingly, they assigned all of us a “priority deadline” to apply, exclusively for our information session. That sounded even weirder—because why would you need a secret deadline exclusively for prospective students?1
It was a quiet morning when I learned about my acceptance. I skipped the school trip to work on a competition, and the school was almost entirely empty—shrouded by the cold fog of late autumn and almost a bit eerie. I sat in my empty homeroom and turned on my laptop. There was a red notification badge on the blue mail app icon. I clicked on it, and the email read,
Dear Lin,
There has been a status update regarding your application.
Please log in to your application portal to see the updated status.
Sincerely,
The Pioneer Academics Admissions Team
My heart began pounding immediately, and my brain was frozen. I frantically rushed to the browser and typed in the link to the application portal. My gut was growling as I entered the wrong link multiple times before it finally worked.
The grueling thing about the application portal was that it didn’t show you the results all at once, instead forcing you to click through countless links to see the actual result. My hands were actually shivering when I clicked through the “View Update” link… And I saw a virtual confetti pop out. There it was! The elusive word—”Congratulations!”
I tried my best to control my raising lips, but a huge smile still appeared on my face. I already began imagining everything that would happen. This would be my first proper research experience! I might get to do something original… and even better, maybe I’d be able to milk a published article out of this! As I was pondering all the possibilities through the hallway, I encountered Sophie, and told her in the calmest way possible that “I was accepted to Pioneer!” I’m sure that she saw through my mask into my overflowing happiness.
Pioneer went radio silent for a while, only occasionally emailing me to sign a document or something. A month later, I received a “status update” email again. This time, I was paired with a professor and a research concentration. And I frowned as soon as I caught a glimpse of it.
The concentration “Hardware Design and Implementation at the Software Boundary” made my heart skip a beat. For one, I had always thought of myself as a software guy, and hardware design is a subject that I had never even touched before. To makes things more confusing, the professor wasn’t from a wholly well-known university for an international student, like Stanford or Vanderbilt; instead, he’s from a small liberal arts college that I didn’t know at all. I searched him up immediately, only landing on a Rate My Professors page full of contradictions. One student said that he was “probably one of the best professors at the college.” But another student remarked that he “has very high expectations and the work is tough.” Will I be able to survive this course? I wasn’t sure. Plus, there didn’t seem to be any way out, as there were no easy ways to switch tracks.
Our mentor from Pioneer was an older American lady from North Carolina. She had a nice smile, but her tone when discussing the schedule was always matter-of-fact, seemingly just reading off a list of bullet points. Our cohort was a curious mix: an Egyptian, an Indian, an American, and three of us Chinese kids. “So, many, Chinese!” I murmured, half amused and half surprised. Before long, we were clicking into Zoom and entering the first group session with our professor.
It was late at night—our group sessions ran from 10:00 to 11:30 p.m. every Saturday, which was brutal for someone like me who wasn’t used to staying up. I even dressed up a little for the occasion just so that I would leave a good first impression on the professor. My chest was aching due to a lack of sleep, and right as I logged on, I fiddled around with the virtual background to hide my messy room and make it look a bit more delectable. And then—ding!—the Zoom doorbell rang. The professor had arrived.
He seemed a particularly nice guy, greeting us with a relaxed “Hi,” and a subtle smile on his pinkish-white face. The content was surprisingly simple, and to my relief, it turned out that most of my peers were just as new to computer hardware as I was. He did assign us a fair amount of homework, including lengthy textbook readings, but overall, it was manageable. Whenever I ran into something confusing, I’d check our WhatsApp chat, and more often than not, somebody else had already faced the problem and explained it. As time went on, I began to think: maybe this wouldn’t be as hard as I feared.
Three sessions into the program, and we were already asked to start writing an initial research proposal. It was absolutely crazy. Three sessions was definitely not enough to get the hang of an entire field—in fact, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Without such an understanding, I found it impossible to find a proper topic.
I was bleary-eyed one night browsing through Oberlin2‘s vast library database. I scrolled over paper after paper after paper, but I couldn’t even parse the titles of half of them, notwithstanding the abstract or the content. The purplish-white accent of Web of Science felt like the vilest color ever known to mankind. Whenever a spark of originality appeared in my brain, I would search it up—only to find twenty papers already published on the subject, each dissecting it from every angle I could—or couldn’t—imagine.
Is that what research was about? I could already begin to see the frustrating, terrifying days ahead. After days on end spent working through the jargon-filled library, I finally found a topic that was both simple enough and not entirely explored—approximate string matching, and specifically, approximate string matching with the Bitap algorithm. To my amazement, there were only three papers published on the subject, and even though I could hardly understand any one of them, the field sure seemed to be underexplored. For the first time in weeks, I had identified a missing piece of the puzzle, and if I were able to figure out a way to fill that missing piece, maybe—just maybe—I would be able to “participate in the creative process of building computing devices for applications of the future”3!
Over the first individual session, I discussed my idea with the professor. It was ambitious in nature—including creating a new and improved version of the Bitap algorithm along with a hardware accelerator for it. But the whole idea raised a simple question. I asked, “do you think it can be done within the timeframe of the program?”
He responded in the nicest way possible, but after a long and meandering explanation, the answer was a clear no. Instead, he told me about his experience that Pioneer’s timeframe was far too short for any meaningful original work—especially something as technical as this.
First, I was confused. Then, I felt abhorrent. Hadn’t Pioneer advertised itself as offering “high schoolers institutional resources to conduct original, undergraduate-level research“? It felt like I was being asked to scale down before I even began. That marketing effort definitely had a great degree of hypocrisy to it. Instead, the professor suggested that I write a review regarding a topic of my choice. I felt like my head was burning while he was talking—but I did nod and thank him politely.
That was our last individual session before the break. In May, Pioneer gives all participants a one-month break where there are no meetings, probably for AP exams. During the exam period, I pondered where this was going next. The professor was right—to learn a whole subject and start doing original research is something Ph.D. students spend years on, and really wasn’t intended for a high schooler to tackle in a few months.
After the AP exams, I wanted to get Pioneer done once and for all. By then, I had pivoted to a more manageable-sounding topic: a review of sequence alignment algorithms and their hardware accelerators. But as I began to investigate a few papers, I realized that “manageable” was an overstatement. I still couldn’t understand them at all. Every sentence seemed to be written in a cryptic language, and half of them utilized terms that I had no idea of at all.
I was on the verge of breaking down as I fretted each time I open my reading list. I had to read each paper three times, searching up each term I didn’t know, draw graphs, reproduce the algorithms, and doomscroll through Reddit in the meantime to catch my breath. And to make matters worse, I was doing it all while out sick. One day, as my friends performed in the assembly hall, I sat alone in the school’s waiting room, with tissues piled like Mount Fuji beside me and my nose running like a broken faucet.
Thankfully, there was still the WhatsApp group chat, and I was relieved to find that everybody seemed to have the same issues. Yet amidst the chaos, I gradually found some clarity. It started with a revelation that—on the tenth paper I read, I no longer needed to look up any terms. And on the eleventh paper, I managed to understand it in one go.
Somehow, I began to recognize patterns at an increasing rate. I saw recurring themes among the papers. I understood patterns of optimizations, and I knew what to read and what to skip. The incredible change happened at the same time as I healed from my cold. For the first time, I was getting the hang of it.
On June 5th, I finally completed a first draft. I was filled with an immense sense of accomplishment and pride as I looked at the 19 pages I had crunched out. I thought, “gosh Lin, you finally got this done.”
The next individual session was on June 12th. In it, I beamed as I shared the incredible progress I had made, visibly excited. The professor murmured, “Well, Lin, you haven’t sent me your paper yet. Would you please upload it to the program portal just so I can see it?”
“One second,” I responded as I rushed to export my paper and upload it. The program portal broke at this exact moment, and I had to refresh it multiple times as I scrambled to get it up. But there it was! Uploaded and ready. “It’s there,” I said. For a few seconds, he scrolled in silence, and I closely examined his expression while trying to maintain a polite smile. Then came the words…
“Holy cow.”
“Holy… cow.”
“Oh my gosh, and this is… nineteen pages?”
I felt myself relax, a warm wave of relief spreading through me. “Well, Lin,” he said, still flipping through my work, “I can tell you that you won’t have to worry about getting a draft done now.”
I laughed out of sheer relief. Oh my gosh, I had done it—actually done it. And maybe, just maybe, I belonged in the world of research as well.
Over the next few individual sessions, I worked on the second and third draft of the paper, along with adding some original elements to it—reimplementation, comparative analysis, and drawing cross-implementation insights. As I am nearing the end of my Pioneer experience, I reflected on what I learned—entirely different from what I expected. When I was applying, I anticipated doing original research—probably in machine learning—and something that I may be able to publish in proper journals. But what really happened humbled me. For the first time, I learned how to approach academic work properly, built the confidence to tackle a completely new field independently, learned to communicate with a college professor, had firsthand experience writing up a paper, and experienced the ups and downs along the way.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. But probably not in the way you’d expect—definitely not the way I expected. Even if it wasn’t the experience I imagined, it was exactly what I needed. And for that, I’m grateful.
(July 2, 2025)