2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas
Turn inspirations into your passion project.
This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.
- AI/ML
- Animation
- Arts
- Biology
- Biotech
- Business
- Cancer
- Chemistry
- Cognitive
- Computer Science
- Creative Writing
- Dance
- Dentistry
- Economics
- Engineering
- Entomology
- Environmental Science
- Ethics
- Fashion
- Finance
- Game Design
- Healthcare
- History
- Illustration
- Languages
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Math
- Medicine
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Nutrition
- Organizational Leadership
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Photography
- Physics
- Psychiatry
- Psychology
- Public Health
- Quantitative
- Social
- Social Science
- Sports Analytics
- Statistics
- Surgery
Charting a Greener Future for Tourist Havens
I'm an expert in economic development and international finance and have spent years studying the intersection of environmental conservation and economic advancement. With biodiversity increasingly under threat from the very tourists they attract, how can policymakers balance environmental conservation and tourism promotion in key areas? For this project, we'll collect public data like hotel occupancy rates as well as environmental indicators like water quality and biodiversity from major tourist destinations. We'll map this data using geographic information systems (GIS) software to identify areas where tourism and threats to biodiversity overlap. Using this information, we'll create a research paper identifying the effects of tourism on local biodiversity and lay out alternate development strategies to promote sustainable economic and environmental growth.
Economics, Creative Writing, Business, Finance
Can you always verify whether the arithmetic mean of a finite set of numbers equals to its geometric mean?
Constructive Real Numbers CRNs were introduced by the founder of Computer Science Alan Turing. Essentially a CRN is a computer generated sequence of rational numbers about which you know how fast it converges. Constructive Mathematics was developed in two schools founded by Bishop in the USA and by Markov and Shanin in Russia. You are give a finite set of numbers. It is well known that the geometric mean of them does not exceed the arithmetic mean. The easy part of the project is to show that when the numbers are rational it is easy to create an algorithm that verifies if the arithmetic mean equals to the geometric mean. The challenging part is to show that such an algorithm does not exist in general when the numbers are CRNs.
Economics, Quantitative, Math
Applications of game theory in industrial organization
In this project, you would examine product pricing history in an industry dominated by a few companies and analyze how companies treat their competition strategically, model the levels of rationality of firms and consumers, examine how well price-setting, quantity-setting and leader-follower models represent business decisions, and determine the impact of competition policy on markets and consumer welfare. You can take this project in either an empirical or theoretical direction based on your interest.
Philosophy, Economics, Math
(Don't?) Judge a Movie by its Trailer
Can we predict a movie's box-office success based on the number of views its trailer receives on YouTube? What about its number of likes? A student pursuing this project might learn about web scraping, time lag effects, and identifying relevant predictors.
Economics
Analyze an economic issue of your choice!
Economics is the study of who gets what and why. Come to me with a few topics you might be interested in: income inequality, gender, race, education, family, technological change, policy, international trade, poverty in developing countries, financial markets, or [insert the blank]. Together, I'll help you formulate a concrete research or policy question. You'll read up on cutting-edge research on the topic, do some investigation yourself, and write up your own answer to the question. On the way, I'll teach you frameworks that economists use to analyze social phenomena and train you to think like an economist.
Economics
Occupational Licensing
In the 1950s only 5% of jobs required an occupational license in the United States, but by 2018 nearly a quarter of jobs required licensing. Though it is claimed that occupational licensing improves quality of products and services in a sector, some critics claim that licensing can harm consumers and innovation. Are consumers hurt by the increases in occupational licensing? Are prices increased when licensing is implemented and how does that impact consumers? Is there an artificial minimization of supply in these licensed sectors?
Economics, Finance
What is a market?
This is an idea in which I'm working on that tries to develop what are the limits of a market. Why is it important? Because to determine whether a firm is a monopoly one has to first determine in what market does the firm operates in. For example, Google is a tech firm? if so why does it main source of revenue is advertising. Maybe is an advertising firm that happens to produce technology. Using quantitative methods I'm trying to systematically define in which market do firms operate in.
Economics, Business
Robots, Bubbles, and Efficient Markets
There's an old joke in economics that goes like this. A financial economist is walking with his student, and the student sees a $100 dollar bill on the ground. The student is excited, and goes to pick it up, but the professor stops him and says, "there couldn't be $100 on the ground. If there were, someone would have already picked it up!" The professor is expressing the "Efficient Markets Hypothesis", that claims all stock prices are correct, because if they weren't someone could buy and sell them to pick up $100. Of course, many economists don't believe this! There is a whole school called Behavioral Economics that studies how markets fail, why prices are wrong, and the human psychology that causes these inefficient markets to emerge. Typically, behavioral economists work with volunteers, who trade stocks or play games (not the fun kind). The economist try to create price bubbles or market frenzies, and show how irrational people are. But what about AIs? We could program AI to play in these game environments together, and see if the same bubbles and market frenzies occur. Do they eventually turn into the efficient professor after playing the game many times? Can they adapt when the rules of the game are changed? What can we learn about ourselves by studying how robots behave in similar situations?
Computer Science, Economics, Math, AI/ML, Finance
What are the effects of minimum wage changes on various economic outcomes like wages, unemployment, and prices?
The literature on minimum wages is one of the broadest in economics. Application of different techniques in the research has often led to very different results from paper to paper, and there is no consensus on the correct answers at this point. You can contribute to this literature by working on a project of your own. The project could be mostly model-based (economic theory) or it could be geared toward testing your hypothesis on the data (empirical economics). Think through what effects you expect, and I can help you design an economic model that will support and explain your reasoning. And/or I can guide you through obtaining the relevant data for testing your hypothesis and analyzing that data.
Economics
Demystifying Inflation
Inflation is defined in so many ways, ranging from de-valuing of the U.S. currency to prices of goods and services unable to catch up with high demand and low supply. We will discuss how to measure inflation, whether inflation is truly "good" for the economy, and how to regulate the monetary supply when inflation goes wrong.
Economics
Bayesian discrimination
A hot topic in recent times has been affirmative action. One theory, called bayesian discrimination, is that employers when hiring someone that is favored by affirmative action don't know if he/she got into the college because of his/her scores or because of affirmative action. Hence they prefer not to hire. Other theory poses that employers are racists, thus they don't hire minorities. I'm trying to disentangle both effects.
Economics, Business
Mapping U.S. inequality
Household income varies dramatically between neighborhoods, cities, counties, and regions in the U.S. For this project, students will first use Census data and mapping libraries in R to visualize the spatial dimension of economic inequality. Then they can home in on whatever factors interest them most—such as differences in education or occupation—or examine several policy proposals intended to address this inequality. Students interested in political science might also want to study the relationship between local economic outcomes and voting patterns.
Economics, Finance, Statistics
Go To Market
Take an idea, be it a product or service, and build it into an actual business plan. Focus on creating value for your customer through your business and create a winning sales pitch to secure sales and/or funding.
Economics, Quantitative, Finance
Prospects for Solar Geoengineering
Solar Geoengineering is a controversial option for rapidly cooling the planet, without removing carbon from the atmosphere, in cases of climate emergency. In this project, the student would explore options for solar geoengineering and produce a research report on their prospects and pitfalls.
Economics, Statistics
Ever wondered how a summer internship can help students?
We can work together to design a research project that looks at how summer internships affect high school students. Do they experience increased aspirations to pursue a certain career? Are they more motivated to do well at school? Do they get better grades? This project will offer you the chance to learn how to design a survey, collect data, conduct interviews, analyze data, and improve your academic writing style. I am open to working on this topic, or any other economics topic(s) of your choosing! For a previous research project, I worked with my advisor on a similar topic. Here is what we found: Recently, policymakers and researchers have explored how time spent outside of the classroom, including early work experience, can affect educational outcomes and reduce inequality across racial and socioeconomic groups. Although research has demonstrated that high-intensity work-based learning programs improve high school graduation and post-secondary enrollment, little is known about the effects of stand-alone private sector employment experiences on student outcomes. We study a unique program that brokers employer-paid summer job internships for Boston public school youth across 150 private sector firms in a variety of industries such as healthcare, finance, biotechnology, higher education, and real estate. Using data from school administrative records, we employ both fixed effects and matching models to estimate the impact of receiving a private sector placement on both high-school and post-secondary outcomes. Both models show similar impacts on outcomes that can be measured repeatedly over time with significant improvements in high school attendance and course failures associated with having had a private sector placement during the summer. Furthermore, we use our matching model to explore outcomes that occur only once, finding that private sector job experience increases standardized test taking as well as the likelihood of on-time high school graduation and college enrollment. These results suggest that private sector employers have an important role to play in the “ecosystem” of summer jobs, beyond government sponsored programs, to support experiences that help prepare youth for both educational and career pathways into adulthood.
Languages, Economics, Math, Business, Statistics
Measuring Income and Access to a Grocery Store
Ever looked at a map of grocery stores near you and wondered why they seem to be more or less clustered together? Well, a simple hypothesis would be that the grocery stores are located where the population is clustered. However, a few simple looks at the distribution of grocery stores and population densities across cities in America may suggest otherwise. Therefore, let's hypothesize that the higher the average income in a given neighborhood access the easier it is for its residents to have a grocery store in that neighborhood. To explore this topic quantitatively, we can use data available online to find statistical correlations between average income per household in a neighborhood and the number of grocery stores in the neighborhood. From the statistical analysis, we draw upon economics concepts and theory to suggest policies that may help ensure grocery access to more people across the U.S., increasing the baseline standard of living.
Computer Science, Economics, Math
Analyze your music listening data from Spotify!
Use Python to analyze your music or podcast streaming data (easily downloaded from Spotify) to show trends, your most popular music genres, or whatever else you can think of! Then design a dashboard to view these trends, and deploy it online.
Engineering, Economics, Math
Do some quantitative social science research!
Do you love numbers and graphs, and have experience with programming? Let's learn about human behavior from a publicly available data set for a topic of your choice. You will learn about how to formulate a research question, work with the data, make plots, make inference, and ask follow-up questions. You'll write this up in a short academic paper describing your analysis.
Economics
Final Notes
Economics informs policy by using theoretical models to identify key forces and empirical tools to test and quantify these in actual data. Any project will have elements of policy discussion, theoretical modeling, and empirical analysis.
Economics
Are Medicare and Medicaid optimal for social welfare?
While many economists agree that some people in the society need the government's help to get better medical services, not all agree on the best method to do so. We can use data on Medicare and Medicaid spending and some measured outcomes to evaluate these policies.
Computer Science, Economics, Math
