From One Broad Idea to Multiple ISEF Awards: Nine Months of Coaching With Elizabeth Hanechak

In May, this student won multiple awards at ISEF. 

Months earlier, they had a research idea, and very little else. No data, strategy, or presentation. Judging by where they started, multiple awards at the largest pre-college science competition in the world was not the obvious ending.

The distance between those two paragraphs took ten sessions with Elizabeth Hanechak. This is how it was covered.

The Start: Where the Student Began

The deceptive thing about the starting point was that it sounded fine. The student could explain a broad research idea out loud, which is what a student who knows what they are doing also sounds like.

The problem showed up underneath. They could not tell their own questions apart. Scope, participants, literature, and complexity were all being raised in the same conversation, with no sense of which had to be settled before the others could even be asked. Ideation, execution, and presentation were one undifferentiated problem the student was trying to solve in a single move.

The Coach, and Why She Started With Scope

Elizabeth Hanechak is a Biochemistry and Biological Physics double major at Brandeis University. Her research in environmental microbiology has been recognized at the International Science and Engineering Fair and the Regeneron Science Talent Search, and by organizations including National Geographic and the American Society for Microbiology. She is a 2nd Place ISEF Grand Award winner in Microbiology and a Davidson Fellow Laureate, and she has run her own independent academic research for over four years.

Four years of that teaches you where projects actually fail, and it is rarely at the technical level. So Elizabeth did not start there. Her diagnosis was that the student needed research framing and scope control.

Through direct questioning and co-planning, Elizabeth separated one tangled problem into its real components, the research question, the design, the ethics, the data, and the communication of the results, and gave each its own timing instead of letting all five compete for the same attention.

By the next session, the student had started the literature review and the build work, and was treating testing as a separate step still to come.

Early Sessions: When Volume Was Standing In for Design

The first design draft exposed the next problem, and it was the opposite of laziness. The student was collecting a large number of contextual variables without showing which question each one served, and without accounting for how self-reporting and group differences could distort what the results appeared to say.

Elizabeth retaught the design as a sequence of decisions made in a deliberate order, where every variable had to earn its place against the question it served, and every figure and form had to carry one clear purpose.

The student came back with a working design, a control condition and a test condition, participant data, and a methodology section. On paper, the project was now real.

Midway: The Moment the Graphs Changed

Then more data arrived, and the graphs stopped saying what they had been saying.

The instinct at that point is to protect finished work, to treat the new numbers as an exception, to keep the version you already have because there is not much time to build another one. The student revised the plan instead.

Elizabeth then changed the question under review, from whether more material was needed to whether the revised figures still answered the original question, and the project shifted from accumulating evidence to making an argument. Two habits had to go with it. Dense writing was burying the claim, and the analysis existed but had not been explained for a reader or a judge.

Elizabeth modeled the fixes rather than describing them, cutting back what hid the argument and bringing forward what carried it. The student rebuilt the graphs, clarified what the statistical comparison actually tested, and reorganized the poster and slides so that the evidence did the explaining instead of the word count.

Competition Preparation: Handing the Research Back

By the final stretch, Elizabeth stopped explaining presentation choices and supplying complete answers, and instead questioned the student's reasoning and tested where it ran out, including how to say out loud that a question fell outside the scope of the study.

The student brought the pitch, the poster, the abstract, the research notebook, and the supporting documents for critique. They began to anticipate judge questions and defend the purpose of the control and their reading of the statistical output in their own words.

The Result

By the end, Elizabeth's questions had stopped filling gaps and started probing for the edges of what the student knew, and the student had answers waiting at every boundary. They could explain their decisions, justify why a particular figure earned its place, discuss a result alongside its limitations, and describe how the control would have to change under a new constraint.

The student could answer the questions nobody had prepared them for, which are the only kind a judge asks.

The student qualified for ISEF and won multiple awards.

What This Looks Like for Your Project

The turning point in this project was the student learning to separate the research question from the design, the design from the analysis, and the analysis from the way it gets communicated to a judge, then being pushed to defend each one on their own. This understanding enabled the student to win at ISEF.

That is what coaching with a past science fair winner is for. If you have an idea, a half-finished project, or a study you are not yet sure how to defend, book a free consultation with an academic advisor, and we will talk through where your project actually stands.