Students around the world collectively check their calendars and often realize they have no time for their passions. School, extracurriculars and other activities can get in the way of focused research like many would wish to do in a specific area of study. However, classes such as AP Research are designed to block out time for students to do just that.
AP Research is a year-long class where students create their own research project and spend the school year collecting data and preparing to present their findings, along with completing a research paper. It’s a senior level class with a prerequisite of an AP Seminar class, which teaches students the research process.
“I always like to tell students it’s a different kind of hard,” AP Research teacher Nikki Dobos said. “It’s workload, yes, but you’re not given readings or assignments. (…) They have to look at experts in the field and come up with their methodology.”
These research projects are tailored to finding gaps in specific fields where there isn’t much data recorded.
“The biggest thing that we tell them is to pick something that they love and that they’re interested in (…) We spend a lot of time diving into that and finding gaps in the knowledge, where there hasn’t been research before,” Dobos said.
Unnati Mishra ‘26 studied the process of how a common pesticide, carbaryl, could potentially block or harm the insulin signaling pathways in our bodies.
“Pesticides are incredibly important to today’s agricultural economy and food demand, and are thus extensively researched before their usage is approved; however, even after approval, research continues, because there are always more ways these chemicals can impact humans and animals in unintended ways.” Mishra said.
During her exploration, she found that a certain pesticide called carbaryl was relatively under-researched despite its widespread use in agriculture and for residential purposes under the name ‘Sevin Pesticide’. When she discovered there was almost no clear-cut research on carbaryl’s effect on insulin signaling, she wanted to address that
Students were also able and encouraged to get help from professionals in their field of study for their projects, such as Mishra.
“I went to CU Anschutz to do my assay, which is called a Western blot,” Mishra said. “The reason this assay couldn’t be performed at the RCHS Biotech lab was that some of the reagents involved weren’t safe for a high school-level lab.”
Research projects are not solely limited to science, however. Students also explore topics different from science, such as the arts and entertainment.
“[AP Research] gives students an idea of the immense amounts of topics you can do research on,” Dobos said. “I think a lot of people, when they hear research, automatically think science, and some of our best projects have been non-science, exploring things like literature or film. They’re like, oh my gosh, research has actually been done on this before?”
Navid Makooi ‘26 studied how crime varies in the host, winning and losing cities of Super Bowls.
“I initially wanted to study how professional sports leagues across America impacted crime in general after I saw a news report of a shooting at a Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade,” Makooi said. “However, because of time constraints, I eventually narrowed the scope to the NFL and Super Bowls specifically, and how it impacts violent crime.”
These projects can also relate to a student’s future majors and help them figure out what they want to do.
“Initially, before I took this class, I was thinking I wanted to do something more calculations based,” Swati Swagatika Nayak ‘26 said. “Now I’m kind of leaning towards bioastronautics as a result of this project.”
Much of these research projects also entail and prepare students for researching projects like these in higher education, such as in college.
“I love space and I’m double majoring in exterior aerospace engineering and astrophysics, so I think [AP Research] was a really good kind of prelude to the research I’ll do soon.” Evan Beuther ‘26 said. “I think [AP Research] was a lot of practice for future research. I want to go to grad school eventually, and that’s all research. It’s a humbling experience when you start research and don’t know much, and learn a lot in that process.”
However, there’s often lots of limitations with these projects, as only being a high school student means less access to the amount of resources that other, higher level researchers may have.
“Because of data unavailability, certain counts of data and Super Bowl years had to be rescinded,” Makooi said. “Moreover, if data was published online by police departments, it had to meet the desired custom data range sought for the Super Bowl year they participated in. On multiple instances, data also had to be nullified because of its inability to meet the desired custom date range for the Super Bowl of the year.”
“[My limitations] were primarily due to the amount of resources and time I had to do my project; even with the relatively small scale of my project, biological research supplies are very expensive, so doing this project on the scale I would’ve liked would require more purchases than would’ve been feasible,” Mishra said.
Although only being a high school student can pose some challenges to research, AP Research is still a valuable resource to use to pursue these types of projects.
“It’s one of the only classes in the building that I can think of where students get mentors from universities, medical centers, or outside places where they make connections with people,” AP Research teacher Bryan McBride said.
“I just think this class is special. It’s special because it’s such a unique class, and I think it really opens kids’ eyes to research in a different light,” Dobos said.
Students will present their research at the Research Symposium on April 28.
