The Senior Ventures Showcase took place in the library on April 30. Through the school’s Senior Ventures program, students dedicate their final year to developing passion-driven projects that reflect their interests, values, and aspirations. It gives students the chance to explore something they are passionate about while building leadership skills and helping the community.
Each project usually fits into one of these four types: Investigation, which is doing research or learning deeply about a topic, performance, or creating or performing something like art, music or podcasts, entrepreneurship, starting a business, or launching a new idea or outreach and helping others through service or education. Students are encouraged to work with professionals outside of school and combine different subjects in their projects.
Every Senior Venture should include hands-on learning, good citizenship and some use of technology. Senior Altas Kosedag shares on the purpose of his and Charlie Patel’s Senior Venture project.
“Me and Charlie’s Senior Venture project is the servant leadership committee, and so our goal with this was to make community service more accessible for students. So what we did was Charlie put together a website and we linked it to the quick links tab on the Darlington website,” Kosedag said. “So students can go on there and sign up to help an event, or go look at the calendar to see when the next community service events are on campus or off campus. This helps them get involved in the community and get their service hours knocked out so they do not have to worry about them.”
Being a year-long project, the Senior Ventures program comes with its challenges. Angeline Myrie talks on the biggest challenges of her Senior Ventures project, “Beyond the Brief” which is a podcast where she talks about crime cases and law.
“The hardest part of my project was the research and the editing, it takes a lot longer than I anticipated it taking,” Myrie said. “Also, it was tough to prepare this and get it all together to create the podcast.”
While the Senior Ventures program offers the opportunity for creativity and growth, it also comes with its fair share of challenges. From managing time to balancing responsibilities outside of school, students often face unexpected obstacles along the way. Kosedag shares on the difficulties he and his partner encountered during the process.
“I think the hardest part about organizing it was planning ahead, it was great to have Charlie as a partner because he is very motivated, but the hardest part was definitely getting prepared,” Kosedag said. “There were a lot of meetings with faculty and emails being sent out. It was just a long process but it eventually worked out.”