{"id":38669,"date":"2026-08-06T17:20:36","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T21:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=38669"},"modified":"2026-08-06T17:20:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T21:20:45","slug":"cardinal-carter-students-turn-research-club-into-international-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/cardinal-carter-students-turn-research-club-into-international-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Cardinal Carter students turn Research Club into international success"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As A.I. continues its rapid rise, it\u2019s can be harder and harder to suss out sources of real information \u2013 but a group of Cardinal Carter students have come together to help their peers hold their own in research literacy as they prepare for university, and their efforts have gone global.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samyar Shafiee, a student at Cardinal Carter Catholic High School who is going into Grade 12 this fall, is one of three students behind the school\u2019s Join Research club. Since its inception within the Cardinal Carter community, it has since grown to more than 300 students across five provinces and two U.S. states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Join Research pairs students with university mentors and free workshop resources, including its free Research 101 course, which offers students the fundamentals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students founded the Join Research club last October under the supervision of their biology teacher. By December, they began looking at ways to scale up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their first stop was establishing a monthly research club at the Aurora Public Library, a component of the program that continues to go from strength to strength. From there, they went online with their Research 101 program where they felt they had the potential to reach thousands of youth looking to build their skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shafiee says there are more resources and programs in the United States to help students develop their research skills and, in founding the club here at home, they were looking to close a gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an online forum with one single classroom where we have live sessions every day for five days a week, one hour from 10 \u2013 11 a.m.,\u201d he explains. \u201cI record those sessions and post it in the classroom, so if you have a time zone mismatch, you can easily watch the videos and ask the same questions. It\u2019s just going to be asynchronous instead of a synchronous class. It still works out as a fully online course because we don\u2019t have the resources as a student non-profit to go to every single province physically. However, what we\u2019re planning to do is do a research competition with the University of Toronto in the winter of 2027.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMost of our students are interested in health science and biology, but we also have a bunch of students interested in engineering sciences and overall STEM. The whole point of the course is that we don\u2019t dive into any content-specific information. What that means is we give you a baseline understanding that you can apply to any topic \u2013 for example, the basic skill of reading an abstract, or the basic statistics behind your data. These basic skills can apply to any sort of content. If you wanted to do a paper in history or the social sciences, you still have to go through the same process of writing, revision, being peer reviewed and all that fun stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For participants, a type of peer review can happen in real time as students are paired with one of five university members \u2013 often undergraduate students \u2013 who work with the teens to take their skills for the next level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf we can just spark that passion in them, they\u2019re going to be doing more work on their own and they\u2019re going to become great researchers on their own after the program,\u201d says Shafiee. \u201cWe want to keep it a fun environment and the whole point is we make it as flexible as possible so anyone can fit it into their schedules\u2026. This is just for helping around the community and in general, Canadians and all international students. That’s the goal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a goal that has been a few years in the making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shafiee came to Canada when he was in Grade 8 with limited English. He quickly found he was adept at learning the language through watching English TV shows and videos on YouTube. At the end of his first year, he earned the Math Award from his elementary school which he said \u201cgave me that little confidence boost that I can actually achieve something.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI went through Grade 9 and Grade 10 just trying to build the skills required for starting this non-profit,\u201d he says. \u201cI always had an idea that I wanted to run something at a high scale, it doesn\u2019t matter whether it is a research organization or even a business. I just wanted to commit to a company or an organizational non-profit I could scale up by some university. From then on, I studied hard, tried to build connections with my teachers, because if I didn\u2019t build up connections with my high school teachers, there would have never been a club to begin with and there would never have been the idea to start a research organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBuilding these connections with people around you is the most important thing I have ever done, and that\u2019s how it helped me excel in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more on Join Research, visit joinresearch.ca or email info@joinresearch.ca<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As A.I. continues its rapid rise, it\u2019s can be harder and harder to suss out sources of real information \u2013 but a group of Cardinal Carter students have come together to help their peers hold their own in research literacy as they prepare for university, and their efforts have gone global. Samyar Shafiee, a student […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":38670,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-a3H","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-04 09:42:28","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/2026-08-06-05.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38669"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38671,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38669\/revisions\/38671"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}