When a kid can really pitch, her parents find a pitching coach before tryouts, and nobody calls it strange. When a kid can really do science, most parents hand them a tri-fold board and cross their fingers. Research competition is a sport, judged and scored, with a season that ends in one loud week in the spring. Almost everyone in it competes uncoached.
Millions of students enter the roughly 365 science fairs affiliated with the Society for Science. About 1,700 of them earn a place at Regeneron ISEF.
You could seat every one of them at one long Thanksgiving table. Winning your regional buys a plane ticket. Then the actual competition starts, against seventeen hundred kids who all just did what your kid did.
Sources: Society for Science, Regeneron ISEF · ISEF 2026 full awards
Most families use whoever is close by. Fair enough. Look at who is close by.
A hero, genuinely. Also buried. Fair coaching happens after the last bell, unpaid, on top of everything else the job already asks. She'll give your kid real time. What she can't give is the second pass — she has never stood where the judges stand, and you cannot coach a standard you have never seen enforced.
Knows the science cold, and if your student already has a university mentor, keep them. But a lab runs on a different clock. In a lab you are allowed to be right slowly. On the floor your student has minutes, and the opening read is over before anyone finishes a sentence.
The big online research programs pair your student with a graduate student halfway through a dissertation: busy, stretched, and doing this on the side. Ask the program whether your mentor has ever competed at ISEF. It's a short conversation. They can help your kid do fine science. So can a good textbook.
All three can help your student. Not one of them is paid to care whether your kid wins in April.
Everyone who advises here won this fair within the last two seasons. The floor your student will stand on is a floor we just left. The record is on the team page, and we'd rather you read it there than listen to us recite it.
One of us now judges and sponsors an award at his own regional and state fairs, so when we rehearse a walk-up, we rehearse it from both chairs.
The rest is how we work. One adviser to one student, and we never ghostwrite: if your student can't defend a sentence, it doesn't go on the board. In April we get on the plane, because eight months of your kid's work should not come down to a good-luck text from another time zone. And you get our personal cell numbers, which we answer, sometimes to our own regret.
ISEF 2026 gave out more than seven million dollars in awards and prizes. The individual top awards pay fifty to a hundred thousand dollars, to a teenager, for science. The founders and advisers here have collectively taken home more than a hundred thousand dollars of that money, so we are not describing the pool from the bleachers. Nobody can promise your student a dollar of it, and the pot is real anyway.
The money is the small prize. We will never tell you research gets your kid into a college; no honest person can. But straight A's stopped being information a long time ago. Nearly every application on the pile carries the same transcript and the same promise about what the student might someday do. A finished piece of original research, defended out loud to strangers who were trying to poke holes in it, is a record of what the student already did — one of the few pages in the file that isn't a promise.
Most families who call us should not hire us.
People sell that. We are not among them, at any number. And from the other side of the judge's clipboard, borrowed work has a smell. Judges find it fast.
Judging has noise in it. A great project can lose a category on a bad morning. If you want a guaranteed result, scroll back to the fourteen. Anyone promising the ending is charging you for weather control.
We have been on the floor at seven in the morning on judging day, and you can tell within a minute which students are there for themselves. So can the judges. If the ambition is yours and the shrug is your student's, keep your money.
There is no honest work left to sell you. Have your kid get some sleep, wish them luck from us, and call in June about next season.
If your student has been reading this over your shoulder, that's the tell.
Our first session is to determine fit and get to know you. Please do not feel pressured to overly prepare!
Book a free consultationOr email us directly at contact@dromospartners.com