SIR Program Killed to Make Way for New Research Program

In a peer-reviewed memo released today, SIR assistant Dr. Roger Idaki announced the closure of IMSA’s celebrated Student Inquiry and Research department.

“There were deep, insurmountable issues with the program’s name,” explained Dr. Idaki. “Firstly, the ‘Student’ part of ‘SIR’ was a disaster. SIR isn’t about the students’ curiosities, dreams, or development of passions. It’s not about students, period.”

Furthermore, “the ‘Inquiry’ part also implied students would be thinking for themselves,” and that simply wasn’t true. As Idaki stated, “our high school students are not kids playing around; we treat them as adults who can robotically execute the ideas of their advisors, who in turn can be properly micromanaged by our department.”

He also addressed an unknown student to further his line of reasoning. “You say you want to be a particle physicist,” Idaki declared. “But you don’t know for sure. Which is why you should be studying trees, not exploring what you might be interested in. Also, we’re not here to turn you into a particle physicist. We’re here to teach you to do research.”

“That is why we have made the difficult decision to kill the SIR program and open a revolutionary new program in its stead: Methods in Scientific Inquiry Part 2.”

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“Research is formalized curiosity,” Zora Neale Hurston once wrote. “Of course, only the curiosities that adults prescribe to you actually matter.”