Senior Project
The Senior Project is the culmination of each student’s career at the high school. There are three major components: experiential, written and intellectual. The experiential component can take many forms, including internships, independent projects, or hybrids of the two.
All Senior Projects demonstrate connection to the outside world, self-led learning in an area of passion, and demonstration of that connection and learning. Recent areas of study include: activism, building a business, engineering, fashion, food, music, media and journalism, and more! A few projects are featured below, and more can be found here.
Featured Projects
Internship at Silman
For my senior project, I worked as an intern at a structural engineering firm called Silman. During my experience, I archived project files and shadowed engineers at site visits. The goal of my experience was to answer questions I had about civil engineering which were: What important qualities should an engineer have, how often do you work with other engineers and what is the one thing engineers spend the most time doing when working on a project?
Games by Cameron
My senior project is a study of game and web development. I spent six weeks learning the fundamentals of game design and worked toward enhancing my technical skills in C# and Javascript. In addition to coding, I drew and designed logos, characters, and background illustrations. I ultimately produced 8 apps/games, of which 6 are available on the Android Play Store. I wanted to learn the process of submitting an application to the App Store and the challenges behind making a game that people would enjoy. My project was an interesting blend between coding, researching, and graphic design.
How to Tell a Story
What are the different ways in which we tell stories? To answer this question I co-directed a play, I immersed myself in literature by Ernest Hemingway and Toni Morrison, and I wrote two short stories, attempting to mimic the styles of these two authors. The play I worked on, “Almost, Maine,” is comprised of eight scenes all set in rural Maine. While the characters share the same background, their stories are not directly related, just brief snippets of their lives, so that understanding each character’s backstory was vital to the success of the play. In trying to mimic two of my favorite authors’ writing I had to determine how they told stories, their aim in portraying their characters and the goal of their writing style, and then incorporate all of that into my writing.
An Exploration into City Politics: An Internship with Council Member Ben Kallos
After interning at Council Member Ben Kallos’ office and working with a licensed Master of Social Work, a Communications Director and a Community Liaison, I learned about the effect city politics has on one’s everyday life, the ways different city agencies function and the inner workings of a New York City Council Member’s office.
Community Service Conference
For my Senior Project, I organized and hosted a four-hour conference for New York City high school students on how they can effectively participate in community service. I was responsible for bringing together five panelists from five different nonprofit organizations in different fields of service work, five different workshops lead by students from all over NYC and over 60 student participants.