Here's my experience. I applied to just MIT and my state university (University of Washington). I got on MIT's waiting list but was ultimately not ac… - Wei Dai

Here's my own horror story with academic publishing. I was an intern at an industry research lab, and came up with a relatively simple improvement to a widely used cryptographic primitive. I spent a month or two writing it up (along with relevant security arguments) as well as I could using academic language and conventions, etc., with the help of a mentor who worked there and who used to be a professor. Submitted to a top crypto conference and weeks later got back a rejection with comments indicating that all of the reviewers completely failed to understand the main idea. The comments were so short that I had no way to tell how to improve the paper and just got the impression that the reviewers weren't interested in the idea and made little effort to try to understand it. My mentor acted totally unsurprised and just said something like, "let's talk about where to submit it next." That's the end of the story because I decide if that's how academia works I wanted to have nothing to do with it when there's, from my perspective, an obviously better way to do things, i.e., writing up the idea informally, posting it to a mailing list and getting immediate useful feedback/discussions from people who actually understand and are interested in the idea.

<nowiki>[</nowiki>By the way<nowiki>]</nowiki>, since you are advising high school students and undergrads, I suggest that you mention to them that they can start being independent researchers before they graduate from college. For example I came up with my b-money idea (a precursor to Bitcoin) as an undergrad, and was also already thinking about some of the questions that would eventually lead to <nowiki>[</nowiki>updateless decision theory<nowiki>]</nowiki>.

I typically find myself wanting to verify every single fact or idea that I hadn't heard of before, and say either "hold on, I need to think about that for a few minutes" or "let me check that on Google/Wikipedia". In actual conversation I'd suppress this because I suspect the other person will quickly find it extremely annoying. I just think to myself "I'll try to remember what he's saying and check it out later", but of course I don't have such a good memory.