CFIS students at UofA Future Scholars Research Symposium

On Tuesday, March 10th, graduating students and full IB Diploma Programme candidates Charlie K. and Alexander B. both travelled to the University of Alberta and participated in the Future Scholars Research Symposium.  This event is part of the wider Festival of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities.  After a university tour and complimentary lunch, the two presented their IB DP Extended Essays to the wider community sharing their analysis with future and current university students.

Our students enjoyed the chance to be able to speak to others about their research.  For Charlie, once she handed in her EE to her supervisor, she thought she was done with it.  Speaking to undergrads at the UofA sparked the idea that she could pursue her research and other lingering questions at the university level.  For Alex, he found some of the questions he fielded to be interesting and offered a fresh perspective on how he approached his research.
 

Charlie K. presenting her EE in Business Management, Balancing profitability and equity: Pfizer’s vaccine supply chain management during Covid-19  

Alexander Bilson presenting his EE in Philosophy, Self-ownership applied to intellectual property 

Festival of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities | University of Alberta 

The differentiator for university applicants

All students at CFIS have an advantage when it comes to university preparedness.  However, IB students and especially those who complete the full programme have a particular edge mainly because of the work they complete during the Extended Essay.  On paper, the extended essay is a 4,000 word academic research paper that students complete independently with the guidance of a teacher-supervisor.  At CFIS, students have roughly a year to complete this endeavour with 3 official meetings and a number of check-ins with their teacher-supervisor.  Beyond the requirements, the EE experience transforms students into more resilient, future ready young adults ready and willing to take on the academic challenges of university coursework and research.

As in real authentic research pursuits, the road is never smooth and has its ups and downs.  The adventure that these students and their teacher supervisor embark on can often lead to challenges.  What to do when an experiment goes wrong?  What if you can’t find the research you were hoping to look for?  Where do you find the time to complete this work?  How do you even read these articles from academic journals?  

Eventually, students learn to overcome these challenges, solve their problems, and figure things out.  This is how their resiliency is authentically developed.  For many of these students, the initial focus is about obtaining the best grade possible.  Yet after a year of hard work they have invested and the competencies they have gained, students often complete their final interviews with their supervisors stating how proud they are of what they were able to achieve, often citing that the task seemed gargantuan at first.  There was fear, nervousness, but having overcome these feelings, they feel more ready for the next step in their post-secondary lives than ever before.   

 

How the CFIS Extended Essay opens doors for university applicants

Past DP students from CFIS have used their extended essays as a means to gain opportunities not necessarily made available to all first year university students.  For example, because of their EE, one student was offered admission into a different faculty that the student originally applied for whilst another was granted a full ride scholarship.  This year, one of our alumni presented her EE to her biology professor and was subsequently invited to participate in the professor’s research group - an opportunity normally not available to first year students.  At a national scale, a study which explored the impact of the extended essay on student success at Canadian universities found that “DP graduates indicated higher ratings than their non-IB peers on self-regulated inquiry learning and were also less likely to view learning primarily as memorization. Former DP students perceived a number of benefits of the extended essay, including developing enhanced organization, reading, writing and analytic skills (Aulls and Lemay 2013; Aulls and Peláez 2013)”.

 

From passion to academic research and writing

Students complete the extended essay as part of the core curriculum of the IB Diploma Programme.  Much like the Creativity, Activity, Service programme, it allows for further exploration of their passions and self-discovery.  In combination with the Theory of Knowledge course, it allows students to develop their self-awareness and sense of identity  The extended essay allows students to develop their research skills, construct new knowledge, and put theory of knowledge into practice such as being aware of the different ways to come to conclusion helping become better critical thinkers, make practical applications to the real world. 

During our last Da Vinci Day, Grade 11 students were presented with the opportunity to complete an extended essay on a topic of their choice.  With the new iteration of the extended essay, students can now explore topics never done before due to restrictions in interdisciplinary topics.  Students can now find it easier to explore topics of interest, what truly passions them. For example, during an exploratory activity on Wednesday afternoon, topics that were discussed included the effects of migration on the culture of the welcoming country, Art & Activism which of these influences the other with examples taken from Picasso and Salvador Dali, and finally to what extent did the colonization of South Africa by Great Britain improve medical innovations in Great Britain, 1806?

Overall, many of our grade 11 students found the experience enriching and are looking forward to taking their next steps of this intellectual adventure.

If you would like to learn more about the Extended Essay, please reach out to CFIS's IBDP Coordinator Christian Legault (clegault@cfis.com) or our Extended Essay Coordinator, Tyler Shaffer (tshaffer@cfis.com). 

Learn more about our IB Programmes 

References

1. Key findings from research on the Diploma Programme Core. IBO. [Accessed March 12 2026] https://ibo.org/contentassets/c354b809a8694c4baffd3afa80c56d19/research-dp-core-key-findings-eng.pdf
    
2. Image of frameworks for the interdisciplinary extended essay. Extended Essay guide (first assessment 2027).  IBO