Seniors Are Wrapping up their Senior Projects
Every Overlake Senior takes on a capstone project ahead of graduation. Known as Senior Projects, our unique spin is that the students share their experiences with the Overlake Community.
“I’ve spent the week reading through the students’ reports on their progress, and there are some very interesting projects being completed,” says Social Studies teacher, Dave Parsons, who coordinates Senior Projects.
Choosing a project is entirely up to the student and their reasons vary. Whether it’s exploring the unknown, chasing a passion, or creating a testament of their time at Overlake, seniors are hard at work right now. “No, I’ve never made clothes before,” says Zander G. whose project Sew, you need some clothes? has him taking to needle and thread to create garments. “I wanted to see what the process was from design to manufacturing. The actual sewing is pretty easy, and the biggest challenge has been finding the right fabrics for my shirts.”
Some projects have the students staying close to home because of a variety of commitments from work, sports, or school. While other students are traveling for their experience. Cassandra H. wins the award for frequent flier miles with her project Working with Animals in Paradise.
She is spending her senior project working with big cats (servals, caracals, lions, and cheetahs) at an animal park/sanctuary called Casela on the island of Mauritius near Madagascar. Cassandra cleans cages, feeds the animals, and plays with them - mainly the caracals and servals, as they are the most domesticated towards humans.
Preparing the food is definitely a new experience as she handles frozen, whole chickens and cares for the bunnies and guinea pigs that are raised to be eventually food for the big cats. “It’s a bit traumatizing handling dead, bloody chickens, but the animals have to eat somehow!”
Meili Z. is back on campus this week selling scrunchies during lunch periods. It’s part of her entrepreneurial project Little Sweet Scrunchies in which she launched a business by making and selling the popular hair fastener. In her first hour of business she sold half of her inventory. “I’m amazed at how fast they’re going,” says Meili as she takes cash and Venmo payments from a lunch room table. “I’ve always been interested in running a business and I love crafting, so this was the perfect combination.” Meili says that the pursuit of having fun was also important and the reaction of students to her product has been overwhelming.
Seniors are allowed to work with partners or as individuals. Evan W. and Esteban S. are creating an app that will allow pet owners to feed their dogs from their device. Titled Automated Dog Feeding, the duo says the app is up and running and will be available to their presentation audience. “We actually discovered that it’s pretty easy to create an app,” says Evan. “The new technology that’s out today is so user friendly that I’m able to focus on design and style rather than hardware and coding.”
Parsons hopes that as many people as possible come and watch the presentations during finals week at Overlake. Here’s a schedule of all the Senior Projects.