Hi, I recently won 1st place in the CBIO category of my regional fair and I wasn't notified properly by the organization (& was stuck outside because the guard was saying you could only come in if you got a call, text, or email) to come in for grand prize judging and as a result lost the opportunity for grand prize and ISEF qualification directly from regional fair. I'm still going to state and I was wondering if anyone has any advice on what can be done for my situation considering the regional fair and making ISEF from TXSEF, would it be much harder and should I improve my project even more?

My NHSJS submission got accepted and it has a lot of revisions I recently completed but I saw that there are journals more selective and free like JHSS and PennScience. NHSJS asks for 250 dollar fee when publishing and this seemed odd to me compared to the other journals and a teacher warned me that they might be predatory. Do you guys think I should continue publishing with NHSJS or withdraw and submit to JHSS or PennScience. If I do withdraw how do you think I should do it? Also should I send my manuscript to a preprint journal if I do withdraw and even though I don't have a mentor what might a be feasible non-high school journal I could try and submit to?

After talking to a bunch of professionals over LinkedIn, I managed to get a Zoom call with someone who works in a similar field to my project idea. They offered to chat/talk to me about my project and some questions, so not a full-on mentorship zoom. Does anyone have advise on how to run the zoom call/ask for questions and possibly ask, after I tell them more, if they might have an idea of someone who could help me more/mentor me?

I know a lot of high school journals are a scam but Rishab noted that you should target peer-reviewed journals. Although the impact factor isn't very high, I don't have many other options to apply to as a higher schooler who has just done their first research project in CBIO without a mentor/senior author. I got my paper reviewed by the science fair teacher and a postdoc from a local university and they said it was undergrad/graduate level writing so I was thinking maybe putting it on a pre-print server and NHSJS. I submitted it to NHSJS a while back and it got accepted they are doing an 8-week formal peer review and extra editorial revision before proper publication. Would this be the credible and proper place to publicize my work for my research journey, resume, and college apps?

I have cold email templates and a research idea but I'm struggling to find 2-3 mentors over a week to email outside of like local state universities and I was wondering how many people you guys email and how you find them through searches on google, college websites, etc? How do you guys approach them and what do you ask of them?