The end of every school year brings about an array of activities for seniors, one of the most infamous of these being senior projects. The two week learning opportunity has often seemed to receive a poor reputation regarding true value, but when Scholium looked further into the issue, it found many teachers and staff members at EA actually hold the converse belief.
Maj Dergham, Associate Director of College Guidance, helps in organizing and regulating senior projects. He explains exactly what the experience is saying, “A senior project is a two week experiential learning opportunity and graduation requirement for every student where seniors dive deeper into a topic that they care about.” This gives seniors the opportunity to experience a personalized and more interesting form of learning, as they choose themselves what they want to study and design a project catered to their own desires. “It can encompass a wide range of things: some students do community service as their basis for the project, some research, and other students intern at companies large and small. Additionally, some students that are more inclined towards the arts, including music, will work on that craft a little bit more,” Dergham noted.
In order to get the projects approved students are required to have a full proposal, including a calendar, approval from their parents, and some type of mentor. Not to mention seniors must present a variety of forms, which they eventually hand in to the senior project committee, composed of college guidance and the current senior form dean. Dergham expressed, “An ideal senior project has an experience throughout the two weeks where you can come up with a tangible product that can display your growth and learning.” A senior project fair was even newly instituted three years ago, where students can show their projects and what they learned, which is why “tangible products” are beneficial.
Dergham also emphasized, “The best projects to me are the ones where I genuinely get the sense that the student has gotten the chance to explore something they are super passionate about or super curious about“. He then continued stating, “I like when students can walk away from it thinking that was a cool experience, I learned a lot about myself, this field, and what I am passionate about.” Holly Johnston, IV form dean echoed this thought by saying, “The kids that make the most of their senior projects truly benefit from it long term.”
The senior project was instituted to reach a variety of EA’s most prominent goals. As Kim Piersall, Director of Experiential Learning, who has been involved in senior projects for a number of years, puts it, “It provides students a longer leash because they still have the comfort of being a student, but they get the opportunity to discover the world around them which they haven’t gotten the opportunity to do in the past 4 years.” She went on to note that, “EA really values that and sees it as an opportunity for students to take charge of their learning”. In other words, it achieves the “nurturing” and “challenging” environment that EA strives for.
Others find value in the senior project in its ability to tell students about themselves or what they are interested in. Johnston stated, “The Senior Project tells students not just what type of student they are, what type of worker they are.” Dergham agreed by saying, “Students get a new found interest or passion or a new found appreciation for the fact that they do not like what they just did.”
These countless benefits to senior projects being noted, several controversies surrounding the experience have arisen in the past, and this year is no different. One of these controversies is that some students take advantage of the independent time allotted to them during the two weeks and use it as a “vacation period.” Johnston expressed that, “You have a chunk of kids who think that they are getting away with doing nothing, but the reality is that they are missing out on an opportunity to do something they may never get to do again”.
Some have expressed that the senior project bears too much of a resemblance to J-term. Christopher McCreary, Upper School English teacher, raised the point, “Seniors should not have both a senior project and a J-term, it should be one or the other because it is more than a month of non-traditional school”. Johnston, agreed with this point saying,
“It is a duplicate, the idea with senior projects is experiential learning.”. However, others, such as Piersall, disagreed in stating, “J-Term and the senior project are not really interchangeable because one is a course that a teacher creates for you… the other is exploring a different community of learners.”
Despite the controversies and claims, this year’s seniors have quite interesting projects planned for this may and look positively towards beginning. Julia Madey ’16 gave insight into her project, “I will be biking from Pittsburgh to DC through allegheny passage, which is 330 miles”. While others such as Ellie Neilson ‘16, who expressed her excitement for her project stated, “as someone who is unsure about a future career path, senior projects are an opportunity for me to explore some of my interests. I am volunteering at Cradles to Crayons and ACLAMO Family Center to look at the entire process of donating to an organization and seeing where my help goes.” Other students with more specific projects, such as Chris Stein 16, also expressed their interest in their respective projects. Stein stated, “I will be doing a bunch of different service projects in hunger, homelessness and education related fields, and the culminating project is policy proposals for government about the problem of poverty.”
With new and exciting ideas being brought out by students this year, EA is giving seniors an exceptional learning opportunity and segway into college.