001AP research, it's like a mini dissertation. The students are learning how to do graduate level research work. Basically, they get through go through all the steps of a year-long research project and they write a paper. It's 25page, 5,000word paper. They come up with a topic themselves. They do all the research themselves. They do interviews or surveys depending on what their topic is. And um at the end of the year, they do a 15-minute presentation and 5-minute oral defense. AP research is the second class in a sequence. AP seminar is the first class. Students can take that as a sophomore or a junior. And then in AP research, students can take that as a junior or a senior. I taught it for eight years in another school district. So I was really excited to be part
002of the inaugural program here. Currently, I am a hostess. I just work at a restaurant. My project was influenced just by the fact that like why do people come into a place like talk to strangers and they're just rude. My topic is the implications of aging out of the foster care system and specifically looking at like teens and their future success. In the beginning, it's it's really hard, especially if you don't quite understand what you're getting yourself into. I will say though, I am really glad that I stuck with it. But once you kind of understand that like this is the first time in school that you really get to do whatever you want. You get to research whatever you want. It's kind of fun. AP research is my favorite class. Not even close. I
003like the independent nature of it and the fact that everybody's able to explore something that they're like truly passionate about. I think a problem with a lot of people in school is they feel that what they're learning just they don't care like it's not interesting for them. But I think that research gives you the opportunity to really like study something that you're genuinely interested in and you want to learn more about. It's very different to like you know from like the normal like writing that you do like in English class cuz it's very like creative writing. This is like academic writing and I've never really done anything like that. I've never really done a research paper before. So, I'd say like definitely it's made me a better writer and it's also made me a better
004reader. You have to like really pay attention when you're reading like other people's research papers in this class. Miss Kak has really like helped me actually every step of the way. I made my slideshow a few days ago and she like had some pointers here and there for ways to cut down on slides or ways to kind of morph slides together which has been such a big help. I don't even have words to express how much I love Miss Kiak and she cares so much about everybody's projects individually. Even when she was like helping me find people to interview, she was like, I know these people here. I know these people here. Like she like went through all her resources to make sure that everybody had like good people to interview. And I just think
005that's made it more enjoyable. [Music] When I was doing my lit review, I reported that 14% um exited the foster care system and became homeless. However, in my own data collection, that percentage is actually higher at 20%. I felt very well prepared, like we have really been working on this all year, every day, really taking it one step at a time through the different chapters of our paper. And in doing so, it helped like culminate a very positive project. And I felt like I knew everything inside and out. So, in order to gain a little bit of a better understanding about how each of my participants view the effects that an environment has on someone's behavior, um I asked them from their lived experience, do you believe that people are inherently good or bad? Overall,
006it went pretty well. I got through everything. I didn't forget any names. But as far as preparing to present, everybody knows their information a lot better than they believe that they do just because we've been working on it for so long. I think this is the best class that you can take at Yorktown. And I mean that hands down and I tell everybody that. Like when I talk to my friends at differenting schools, when I talk to like underassmen, I tell all of them to take AP Seminar and AP research. I really enjoyed both of these classes. I really enjoyed kind of looking into something in a lot of depth that you wouldn't be able to do in a typical class. It's definitely a great class to take because they're really learning how to be
007college level researchers in high school. They have such a leg up going into college. I know that they're going to go into a research class. They're going to know all the things that they have to do already.