Join Research started because of a pattern we kept noticing and could not explain away.
The students around us who ended up doing real research were rarely the most curious ones. They were the ones whose parent knew a professor, or whose school happened to have a teacher who used to work in a lab. Everyone else was told to be proactive and left to figure out what that meant.
The gap was information, not talent
When we started asking students why they had not tried research, almost nobody said they were not interested. They said they did not know what research actually involved, they assumed you needed a lab, or they had emailed a professor once, heard nothing, and concluded the door was closed.
None of those are ability problems. They are information problems, and information problems are fixable by people who have the information and are willing to hand it over.
That is the whole idea. We are high school students who worked out how this system functions, and we would rather explain it than keep the advantage.
What we decided early
Three decisions have held up since the beginning.
- The core programs stay free. The moment a program costs money, it filters for family income rather than curiosity, and we would be rebuilding the exact barrier we started out trying to remove.
- No experience requirements. Programs that ask for prior research experience are sorting students who already had access. We assume zero and teach from there.
- Mentors who are actually doing the work. Students can tell the difference between someone reading from a deck and someone describing a problem they were stuck on last week.
What happened
We have reached over 300 students across five provinces and two U.S. states, through workshops, library events, and mentor sessions. Research 101 runs online, five live sessions a week for four weeks, with every session recorded so a time zone or a shift at work does not cost you the program.
Our mentors now come from MIT, UC Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toronto, Western, York, and Toronto Metropolitan University. We do not publish their names, because they mentor as individuals rather than as representatives of their institutions, but that is where they study and work.
What is next
The Symposium arrives in Winter 2027 in downtown Toronto, with a high school division and a university division, cash prizes, publication opportunities, and internships. We are building it to be the biggest student research symposium in Canada.
Beyond that, the goal has not moved. More students doing real research, earlier, without needing to already know someone. If you are reading this and you have been waiting for permission to start, this is it.