The process behind senior independent projects

Next week, 16 senior independent projects (SIP) will be presented in the media center for all to attend. The seniors presenting have worked on their projects for the past five weeks and have gone through an extensive process to get to this point.

Academic Center teacher Barb Wolfson and English teacher Barbara Shellito first informed students about the opportunity last December at the senior class meeting. Emails were then sent out to the whole class with dates for informational meetings. Interested students then downloaded an application.

The application required students to find an advisor from inside and outside the high school, but there were some exceptions.

“Sometimes they can be the same person, depending on what the project is and if it’s hard to find an outside person,” Wolfson said. “That’s someone that you as a senior are checking in with pretty much weekly just to keep people abreast of how you’re doing, and if you have challenges, maybe ask them, ‘What are you thinking? Where else can I go with this?’”

Students also marked which classes they planned on dropping. For each class dropped, students must work for five hours on their projects. Students cannot drop AP courses or certain courses that include a final project. Students were required to check in with their prospective colleges before turning in their application to see if the college would take the SIP credits.

The largest part of the application was the written proposal. Students explain their idea, how they would execute it, why it’s important to them and how it could benefit the Wayland community.

“It’s an opportunity for seniors to explore something that they’re really passionate about or something that they’re interested in learning about,” Wolfson said.

Once applications are submitted, the SIP committee, which consists of four teachers from different departments, Shellito and Wolfson, reviewed the applications and sent feedback to students.

“Once we go through them, we say, ‘Okay this is a really great idea, but it needs to be developed more. Love this, not worth three classes to drop. More like two or maybe even one,’” Wolfson said. “So we go through all of that, and then we return it back to the students and say, ‘We think this is a great idea, but we need you to tweak it a little bit,’ and then they can bring it back to us. There are some projects where we say, ‘You know, this isn’t worthy of a senior project and dropping a class and spending time doing this.’”

Projects were then chosen, and students began working and dropping their classes as soon as fourth quarter began. Although there were multiple snow days, and fourth quarter was delayed a week, the seniors’ last day won’t be pushed back. Because of this, students only have 5 weeks to work on their projects.

Once a week, students hand in a one page journal about their progress, their successes, their struggles and what they plan to focus on during the next week. If English is one of their dropped classes, these journals are turned into their teacher for credit.

This year, Wolfson noticed a change in the format of senior projects.

“I think this year students are making more use of technology,” Wolfson said. “There’s more blogging going on and uploading videos to YouTube of themselves performing, so that’s a little bit of a different shift.”

Students will present at 6:30 p.m. on May 27. On the same day, they will be available in the media center during lunch block to talk with students about their projects and encourage future seniors to apply.

“They have five minutes [at the final presentation] to give a brief glimpse of what their project is,” Wolfson said. “What I find to be really neat is seeing students getting up who sometimes don’t have a large presence. To see them get up and talk about what they’ve done for their project is an amazing, amazing thing to watch.”

2015 Senior Projects:
Libby Chafe and Megan O’Keefe – The Role of Women in Film, 1950-1990
Haley Cohn – A Cooking Blog for Cancer Patients
Drew Donovan – Write and Illustrate a Comic Book
Anna Downs and Anna Hubbell – A Guidebook to Wayland Conservation Land Trails
Nat Gordon and Chase Purrington – Creating an Investment Blog
Nina Haines – Around the World in 30 Plates
Jameson Hunt – Making Music 101: Creating an EP
Brendan Lau – “Humans of Wayland”: Sharing Interviews and Portraits
Paul Longnecker – Remodeling a Basement
Charles Lucier – Building a Custom Home Theatre Audio System
Julia Mitrano – Senior Stories from Carriage House
Daly Place – Internship at Haley House
Jenna Salgannik – Recording Cover Songs: Audio and Video
Jillian Skowronski – Meet with Sweets: A Trip Around Wayland
Ethan Toga – Creating a Musical Presence on the Internet
Olivia Zhao – Eccentric Elegance: A Fashion Blog