@Daniel Y I know that everything is voluntary, but it's sad that people are wasting tons of money and hours of their time on low quality programs and nonprofits. We should work on things with substance and value. This issue is that these companies are coming in and exploiting teenagers who value prestige rather than value.

Don't publish in a journal. Do a conference like AAAI, IJCAI, anything *ACL (ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ConLL, COLING), NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc. These are all double-blind reviewed so they won't see your names or affiliations

@S K just look up the conference name and there should be a website

No. $4750 is a cost that's a highway robbery. It doesn't matter if it's harvard or the fbi or your mom offering it, it's a scam. Apply to an actual startup.

Here's some advice. I will actually answer the question in number 2. 1. I'm ngl, research is terrible at some points. Even if you do everything right, you will always run into dead ends. Make sure you have the time and the patience, whether its fueled by passion or just simple resilience. 2. If I were to start with a CS research project, the easiest place to start would be either Prompting Methods in NLP or Dataset building. Here's a paper published in a top conference by a literal freshman in HS: https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.45.pdf The methodologies don't have to be too complicated but they still need to be novel and useful, so try to find your own spin on different existing methods before coming up with a completely new one.

This is cheating