Two Weeks, Seven Sessions, Two Coaches: Late-Stage Defense Prep Before a Grand Award

This student began coaching with a narrow timeframe and a clear goal. The student had already qualified for ISEF in May, and started working with ScienceFair in April. The student had a project, a poster, and a prepared pitch. What the student was not ready for was mock judging: asked something they had not rehearsed, their answer would drift.

Seven sessions later, across two weeks and two coaches who came at the same problem from different directions, the student won a grand award in Translational Medical Science at ISEF.

The Coaches

The student worked with two ScienceFair mentors on the same set of issues, each coming at them differently.

Kara Gaiser is a two-time ISEF Grand Award winner in Energy, a Brooke Owens Fellow, an AIAA-published researcher, and a NASA JPL alumna, and she recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

Amanrai Kahlon studies Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania with a Wharton minor in Healthcare Management. He is a U.S. Presidential Scholar, a Coca-Cola Scholarship semi-finalist, and one of the top 40 national finalists in the Regeneron Science Talent Search.

Between them, every session in those two weeks was either teaching the fix or testing whether it had held.

The First Sessions: Where the Student Started

This student's answers to questions would move toward a related limitation, a piece of technical detail, or a point already prepared, rather than answering the question.

Everything the student said was true and relevant to the project, but none of it was reliably relevant to the question in front of them.

Kara and Amanrai helped the student to work out what a judge has actually asked, choose the level of detail that answers it, and keep the explanation tied to the claim being defended.

The First Fix: The Question, Not the Answer

Both coaches taught the student how to take a question apart before answering it, so that the thing being asked gets addressed first and everything else has to earn its place afterward. They pushed the student to explain technical choices in plain language and to connect each separate stream of evidence to the decision it actually supported.

The change was visible within a few rehearsals. The student started asking for clarification when a prompt was ambiguous instead of guessing at it. The student revised one of their own answers, unprompted, once they could tell the difference between a limitation of the study, a barrier to clinical use, and a future step.

The Second Fix: When the Script Was the Problem

Then the delivery caught up with the content. The early scripts were information-rich but too long. They repeated claims, and the transitions were fragile, which meant an interruption from a judge could leave the student without an obvious way back in.

This is where running two coaches earned its place. Kara modeled cutting the redundancy, moving the central claim and its evidence earlier, and handing the explanation over to the poster wherever a figure or a result could carry it better than a sentence could. Amanrai went at the recovery problem from the other side, building verbal anchors into the methods, the results, and the next steps, then interrupting the student deliberately to see whether they could pick the thread back up.

Same weakness, two angles. One coach made the script shorter. The other made it survivable when someone cut across it.

The Closing Sessions

By the last few sessions, Kara and Amanrai had stopped demonstrating how to answer and started testing whether a decision could be defended under unfamiliar questioning.

The student could deliver a coherent account from a remembered framework rather than a memorized script, use the poster to support a claim without reading off it, explain why a particular method or analysis had been chosen, identify a limitation without abandoning the central argument, and keep a current result distinct from a future validation step.

The Result

Judging at ISEF happens in conversation. The research matters, but what a judge can actually assess is how a student explains it and what happens when they push on it. That was the weakest part of this project in April and one of the strongest by May.

The student won a grand award in Translational Medical Science.

What This Looks Like for Your Project

Two weeks is not a lot of time, but it is enough time to fix how a project is defended, which can make a substantial difference in front of judges.

If your project is built and the fair is close, book a free consultation with an academic advisor, and we will look at where it stands.