With just a few days remaining, seniors are ready to begin their final leap of their senior projects. The world will truly be their oysters after they step foot out of the front doors on Apr. 25, and the new adventures they’ve been planning for the past year are waiting for them in the following month.

The two advisors who supervise the senior project program this year are science teachers Karissa Baker and Amy Stading. Baker took over the co-advising process from Mollie Ward when she left after the first semester to go on sabbatical.

Despite the seniors leaving in May to execute their projects, to get to this point took a lot of planning and is nowhere close to the beginning of the senior project process. The senior project planning process first begins in the Fall with the advisors leading class meetings about the projects’ workflow and an introduction to the process to the seniors.

Stading said, “In the fall semester, we lead some pretty big picture overview activities with seniors. And then when we come back from winter break, it starts to get more intense. We start talking with them about the different requirements, we do some coaching with them about how to find mentors and the proposals themselves, which is a fairly rigorous process that begins in mid-February, and then they are submitted and reviewed in early March.”

Planning the senior projects is also not an easy process. Some of the main requirements that the seniors must incorporate into their projects in order to complete them and graduate are finding a mentor, completing at least 12 hours of community service over May and 20 hours of working on their capstone projects per week.

May marks the seniors’ final capstone projects they’ve been planning, and the scope of the projects have greatly increased since Covid.

“Through Covid, we had to adapt and allow for more independent ventures. […] While we no longer need to be virtual, I think the program has adapted to allow for a wider range of types of topics. Also, kids aren’t necessarily limited to opportunities only in the Twin Cities or, you know, more remote opportunities if they have the ability to travel,” said Stading.

Some senior projects take place far out from the Twin Cities like Jacob Colton, Humza Jameel, Rohan Kharbanda and Andrew Evens’s senior project. The four students are venturing out to the Boundary Waters to collect water samples and track invasive species, as well as taking a Wilderness First Responder (WFR) certification course.

Colton said, “We started off camping. It was us four, and then we started planning our own trip. Last year, we planned a trip by ourselves and we have another plan this summer. But my advisor was actually the one that mentioned it, since she knew that we did these kinds of trips, getting WFR trained, and so that was the first idea for our project.”

On the other hand, there are also seniors who choose to stay local in the Twin Cities and further explore their interests closer to their homes like Victor Valdez and Saurin Patel who chose to volunteer at KFAI radio station to learn the ropes of working at a radio station and also later produce some music of their own.

The two have always been interested in music production and are avid listeners. Patel is currently in a band called Gauze, and Valdez also plans on joining Radio K of the University of Minnesota next year.

The planning process for the Valdez and Patel was more difficult to complete as not every mentor and music station they reached out to were able to offer them a position at their workplaces.

“It was a bit rough. We [Valdez and Patel] sent out about like 10 to 15 emails to different people. We got responses from about four, one of them being KFAI. The response that we got from them was after the end of the [senior project] timeline, so we turned ours in a day before the extended timeline. So it was a bit close, but we made it,” said Patel.

No matter how the process goes and where they choose to travel to, senior projects serve as the final assignment for seniors as the year comes to a close. It is an opportunity for them to choose a topic they are passionate about and pursue a deeper understanding of it, giving them a peek into life after graduation.

Updated: Format 4/28/2025