Seniors Nora Shaughnessy and Annika Lillegard have two very different senior projects connected by a common thread: community service.

Shaughnessy will be photographing and interviewing immigrants to tell their stories and capture a portrait of their lives. She’ll be taking photographs of where they live and their personal belongings to get to know them and the story of how they came to the United States.

“As an immigrant myself, I think it’s very powerful and good to learn about other people’s life stories and especially capture it through a photo too because you usually just read a book or something like that, but actually seeing what they went through is different,” Shaughnessy said. She’s planning to compile the photos into a presentable photographic essay or portfolio.

In addition to photography, Shaugnessy will be furthering her knowledge of immigration and rights through volunteering at the East Side Freedom Library. Shaughnessy first came to know of the library when doing her research paper in 10th grade.

The library is known for its collection of rare, social-justice focused literature collection, which includes writings on contemporary and past racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. At the library, Shaughnessy will be taking photographs and helping to organize events and administrative duties as well as assist with research.

Annika Lillegard, on the other hand, is going to be shadowing a neurosurgeon’s clinical work at the University of Minnesota for her senior project, a field of study that she is interested in potentially pursuing as a career.

After having tossed several different ideas for her project, Lillegard finally realized why she found neurosurgery a compelling pursuit: “We understand a lot about the human body. Undoubtedly we understand more than we did even 20 years ago, right? But the brain is one of the areas where we still don’t know a lot,” Lillegard said. Lillegard also took a neuroscience class this year, which sparked her interest.

For the community service aspect of her project, Lillegard will be working with an organization called Matter, an NGO committed to uplifting communities globally by reducing and recycling medical waste. The organization takes “expired” materials — which are often not chemically expired — and redistributes the reusable products to underserved communities.

“There are so many things in medicine that have…expiration dates. And the thing is that they don’t actually expire for like another two or three years and then they’re thrown away…because that’s how first-world countries operate,” she said.

Some of the items that Lillegard will be using at the U of M are items that she might see reused and will be sorted as part of the community service project.

“Some crazy things expire that you never would think expire — like scalpels. You can only keep a metal stainless steel scaffold for picking like X number of years. So we are going to be sorting out the medical materials [and] looking at the dates, putting them in the right categories, making sure that we have them all labeled so that you can ship off to the right places with the right expiration [date]. So we know when they actually chemically expire versus when they say they expire,” Lillegard said.

Shaughnessy and Lillegard’s advice for rising seniors is to find volunteering opportunities that are relevant to your project and that you’re genuinely interested in.

“This is gonna sound so cliche. It’s really easy to just check a box. And that’s what I was honestly considering doing, just checking the box,” said Lillegard. Instead of looking last-minute for a volunteering project that would be easy to complete and that she didn’t feel passionate about, Lillegard, like Shaughnessy, put in the effort to do work that they believed in.

Both Lillegard and Shaugnessy have found volunteering opportunities that will enrich their senior project, and hope students next year will do the same.