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Research often focuses on the intersection of disciplines, and interactions between researchers from different departments at universities create an environment for this to occur. Formulating a new argument requires unique experiences and perspectives. While still in high school, however, Brianni Lee seized the unique learning opportunities available in New York to produce independent research.
Attending the Juilliard Pre-College program to study music on Saturdays, Lee turned an assignment intended to be five pages into a comprehensive research paper. The assignment focused on the life and music of Arnold Schoenberg, an Austrian composer who helped define musical thought in the early 20th-century. Lee’s research led her to explore other German philosophers during the same time period: “that was my first time encountering the part of philosophy that I am interested in, which is aesthetics, particularly philosophy of music,” she reflected.
Her research focused on the transition from the classical period to the Romantic period in musical history, as well as romanticism in the wider lens of philosophy. She explored how musical Romanticism can be used to redefine the larger movement of Romanticism, challenging how we commonly think about the romantic era of intellectual thought.
Resolved to expand the project into a larger paper, Lee approached the resources available to her for guidance, particularly her English teacher for writing and AP European History teacher for historical and philosophical context. “[It’s] funny because it was not a project related to my high school,” she said, “I was pretty lucky having teachers who… [were] super interested in whatever I was doing outside of school.”
Lee read numerous primary sources from authors traditionally associated with Romanticism and others who were not, attempting to use musicological thought to cast the period in a new light. After completing the paper, the next step was deciding how to share it. “I looked at a bunch of options for journal publication, and for philosophy, there’s not a lot… [that] accept high school research papers,” she shared.
At the prompting of a high school teacher, she switched her focus to conferences, which often don’t require the submission of a full paper and a biography prior to attending and presenting. The approach was successful: “I was invited to various international interdisciplinary musicological conferences, which were perfect for my research.” These included conferences in Greece, Georgia, and Turkey.
Lee continued studying and researching philosophy at Harvard, graduating in 2020. Her work at Harvard maintained a focus on German philosophy, including figures like Theodor Adorno. She was invited multiple times to deliver oral presentations at conferences, and she won grants to continue researching. The Harvard Center for Jewish Studies funded her travel to Germany for a project on Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger.
Even for experienced scholars like Lee, the structure of academia discourages undergraduates from publication. “I did submit my papers to a bunch of undergraduate research [publications],” she shared, “[but] publishing your paper is considered to be, at least in the humanities, something that you would do in grad school.” Publishing a paper in a journal is extremely selective, especially for prominent publications. Professors, postdoctoral students and other professional academics also struggle with the process and leverage personal networks. Undergraduate publications are less exclusionary, but they don’t capture the entire nature of peer review. While they do have processes of peer review, they are designed “to emulate the more professional publication process that happens on a graduate level,” she added. “It does not go far enough in really emulating the peer reviewed publication process because it’s all done by undergrads without the help of professional academics.”
Lee believes there are multiple reasons that graduate students have better access to research advising and publication, starting with the traditional structure of an undergraduate education. Programs are not designed for undergraduates to create their own original ideas. “The assumption is that you first take your courses, write your short essays, get graded, [and] do enough of ‘learning’ before you can start independent research.” Traditional universities are also limited in resources: “It’s difficult to provide the kind of support required for research to all undergrads, given that many one-on-one meetings have to take place between researchers and supervisors.”
Jinso creates more accessibility to the research community by connecting young researchers outside the university ecosystem, including high school students, to research opportunities. A social network for scholars, Jinso connects researchers to mentors so they can complete a research project and share their work online.
GitHub is a popular platform used by computer scientists to manage their collaborative projects, but a similar program does not exist for academic work. There is no standard platform to create work, connect with others, and share work in one place. Most platforms only fall into one or two of these categories.The Jinso collaboration tool is a better way for groups to work on projects. By bringing the entire academic collaboration process onto one tool, it simplifies workflows and communication.The first steps for using the Jinso platform are:
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects. Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time.
Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects.
Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time. Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
When a new Project is created, an initial revision must be shared. This can either be plain text or a PDF.
The Project will be immediately visible to all Group members with the first revision shown. Group members can comment on the revision with questions or feedback, and others can reply to comments.When another revision of the paper has been completed, the Group admin can add a new revision to the same Project.
The revision will become visible above the prior revision, and it will have a new comment box associated with it. Projects make it simple to keep track of a paper’s entire revision history and discussions at each stage.
For each revision, Group admins can also create subtasks. Arrows allow Group members to view all of the different subtasks and comment on them individually. Subtasks allow a paper to be analyzed in unique components. For example, a research paper can have a unique subtask for each of its sections, and collaborators can discuss them all separately in the comment boxes. Jinso is a quicker way to collaborate on long-term projects. It makes it easier to connect, share, and manage the development of ideas and papers. You can create a Jinso account and start using the platform today for your research and academic needs at jinso.io.
Research often focuses on the intersection of disciplines, and interactions between researchers from different departments at universities create an environment for this to occur. Formulating a new argument requires unique experiences and perspectives. While still in high school, however, Brianni Lee seized the unique learning opportunities available in New York to produce independent research.
Attending the Juilliard Pre-College program to study music on Saturdays, Lee turned an assignment intended to be five pages into a comprehensive research paper. The assignment focused on the life and music of Arnold Schoenberg, an Austrian composer who helped define musical thought in the early 20th-century. Lee’s research led her to explore other German philosophers during the same time period: “that was my first time encountering the part of philosophy that I am interested in, which is aesthetics, particularly philosophy of music,” she reflected.
Her research focused on the transition from the classical period to the Romantic period in musical history, as well as romanticism in the wider lens of philosophy. She explored how musical Romanticism can be used to redefine the larger movement of Romanticism, challenging how we commonly think about the romantic era of intellectual thought.
Resolved to expand the project into a larger paper, Lee approached the resources available to her for guidance, particularly her English teacher for writing and AP European History teacher for historical and philosophical context. “[It’s] funny because it was not a project related to my high school,” she said, “I was pretty lucky having teachers who… [were] super interested in whatever I was doing outside of school.”
Lee read numerous primary sources from authors traditionally associated with Romanticism and others who were not, attempting to use musicological thought to cast the period in a new light. After completing the paper, the next step was deciding how to share it. “I looked at a bunch of options for journal publication, and for philosophy, there’s not a lot… [that] accept high school research papers,” she shared.
At the prompting of a high school teacher, she switched her focus to conferences, which often don’t require the submission of a full paper and a biography prior to attending and presenting. The approach was successful: “I was invited to various international interdisciplinary musicological conferences, which were perfect for my research.” These included conferences in Greece, Georgia, and Turkey.
Lee continued studying and researching philosophy at Harvard, graduating in 2020. Her work at Harvard maintained a focus on German philosophy, including figures like Theodor Adorno. She was invited multiple times to deliver oral presentations at conferences, and she won grants to continue researching. The Harvard Center for Jewish Studies funded her travel to Germany for a project on Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger.
Even for experienced scholars like Lee, the structure of academia discourages undergraduates from publication. “I did submit my papers to a bunch of undergraduate research [publications],” she shared, “[but] publishing your paper is considered to be, at least in the humanities, something that you would do in grad school.” Publishing a paper in a journal is extremely selective, especially for prominent publications. Professors, postdoctoral students and other professional academics also struggle with the process and leverage personal networks. Undergraduate publications are less exclusionary, but they don’t capture the entire nature of peer review. While they do have processes of peer review, they are designed “to emulate the more professional publication process that happens on a graduate level,” she added. “It does not go far enough in really emulating the peer reviewed publication process because it’s all done by undergrads without the help of professional academics.”
Lee believes there are multiple reasons that graduate students have better access to research advising and publication, starting with the traditional structure of an undergraduate education. Programs are not designed for undergraduates to create their own original ideas. “The assumption is that you first take your courses, write your short essays, get graded, [and] do enough of ‘learning’ before you can start independent research.” Traditional universities are also limited in resources: “It’s difficult to provide the kind of support required for research to all undergrads, given that many one-on-one meetings have to take place between researchers and supervisors.”
Jinso creates more accessibility to the research community by connecting young researchers outside the university ecosystem, including high school students, to research opportunities. A social network for scholars, Jinso connects researchers to mentors so they can complete a research project and share their work online.
