County Interview Guidance

    The County website offers some great resources:

     Tips for a successful scientific interview (GREAT resource from Science Buddies)

     These presentation slides, while not all relevant to the interview, contain very helpful information towards the end of the presentation. We highly recommend going over this document:  https://www.rcoe.us/student-events/files/2014/06/judges-perspective.pdf

Here are some potential questions you might be asked:

     How did you get this idea?

     Why is your project important?

     How is your project innovative?

     What did you learn while working on your project?

     What would you do differently if you were to do this again?

      What would you do next?

     What questions do you now have about this field?

     What have others done in this field?

     Who helped you?

1. And this final question, with some hints as to an answer:

2. Are your findings significant?

   1. This one is a trick question! In everyday language people use “significant” to mean “meaningful” or “substantial”, but to a scientist the term “significant” specifically means you conducted a statistical evaluation of your data and found mathematical support for or against your hypothesis. At the elementary school levels, this is well beyond the grade levels. So, unless you can explain underlying assumptions, type I and type II errors, and p-values, you should not use the term “significant”. The judge is testing your knowledge of this term.

   2. BUT if the judge asks “Are your findings important?” Then they want to know if you can link your project results to the bigger picture because scientists are generally not as good as they should be at communicating the importance of their work.

   3. Good answer: Identify the groups of people (farmers, engineers, managers, law makers, etc.) that might benefit from whatever question you tried to answer and describe why they might need to know this information.