In other words, if there's one thing I've learned so far in life, it's not to underestimate the power of simple human contact. Go knock on a random professor's door, and I think you'd be surprised how many times the door opens!
Really? I went to three different summer programs at Ohio State University when I was in high school. Great fun.
My last summer program ran nine or ten weeks and had me playing RA in a biochemistry lab. One of the most generous masters' students in the whole world (I think the poor guy was in his 3rd or 4th year... he was kind of a long-term masters student ;) spent most of the summer teaching me stuff -- growing bacteria, lysing them, running chromatography columns, gels, enzyme activity assays, the works.
He was crazy, actually, to spend that much time teaching a high school junior who would never come back to the lab, but I hope he's having a happy career somewhere because he sure was generous.
Obviously, if an organized program exists, take it! My point was that the absence of such a program does not preclude you from taking an individual initiative to do something creative.
Even if you don't care about the competition, it's an easy pretense for getting in touch and working with a professor. Plus, you might be able to convince your school to give you time during the day to work on your research (when I was in HS, we got a period every other day).
Awesome rule to live by!
Maybe parts of it. In that it's extremely unlikely in ten years you'll talk to more than one person from your high school, but you'll still talk to many of your friends from college.
The problem with high school is you are stuck socializing with the people who happen to be geographically close to you. You don't get to choose who they are, so they could be a bunch of jerks and you can't do much about it. At college, that is WAY less likely to happen.
But you still can learn interesting stuff in high school, AND socially it's still an important step to go through all that dating/hanging out/partying stuff. You could wait until college to do that, but it would be awkward.
Try something similar. High school is a massive, pointless waste of time. It's like prison. Get out of it by any means but be smart. Meaning: don't go apeshit and kill your classmates. If you do drop out, have a plan on how you can give people what they want so they can feed you and clothe you. May be you want to spend the rest of your days working in a Walmart, but probably not.
Anyway, don't stress over it. You're in a fucking America, you won't die of hunger :) And you'll die regardless of whether you went to high school or not, so don't worry. It doesn't really matter in the long run so enjoy the fact that you were born in this perverted (but fun) world.