A family friend's lab has offered our 16 year old a summer project. Real experience or padding?
Our daughter is finishing the first year of the IB diploma. A friend of ours who runs a small research group at a university here has offered to let her spend five weeks of the summer in his lab, helping a PhD student clean and label data. Unpaid, three days a week. She's keen. I'm unsure. One half of me says this is exactly the exposure she should get. The other half says it's a family favour that admissions readers see through in a second, and that she'd learn more from something she found herself. We haven't decided whether she's applying abroad or in India yet, which makes it harder to judge. Has anyone's teen done something like this? Was the work real, and did it matter later?