The final five weeks of the school year mark an exciting time for some seniors at New Trier High School: Senior Project. This year, about 90 students, or roughly 10% of the senior class, have taken on a project as their high school career comes to a close.
Senior Project is a unique opportunity for second-semester seniors at New Trier. These students, rather than attending all of their usual classes, are able to work on an independent project outside of school.
Students who choose to embark on a project are given a lot of freedom to follow their interests and gain new experience.
“Senior Project gives kids the opportunity to follow a course of action or a course of learning that they design,” Senior Project Liaison Chris Van Den Berg says.
Students are expected to put a lot of hard work into their projects, and their final product will be displayed in an exhibition, held on the indoor track, on May 22. Students working on a modified project, where they still attend some classes, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses, are required to complete at least 12.5 hours of work every week, and students on a full project will work for a minimum of 25 hours each week.
Beyond the time requirements, the projects can vary broadly across students, and Van Den Berg affirms that staff work to provide access for any New Trier student interested in launching a project.
“With the breadth of opportunities that Senior Project provides, there are a multitude of different experiences,” Van Den Berg says.
To get a better idea of this, I sat down with three students currently on project to discuss what they have been working on.
Kendall Humphries-Solis – Constance Women’s Golf Apparel
Kendall Humphries-Solis grew up playing golf, and she has been a member of the girls varsity golf team at New Trier since her freshman year. However, she always struggled to find quality women’s golf clothing.
“The problem is it’s women’s collections in men’s apparel lines, and they’re not proper for golf,” Humphries-Solis says.
For her project, Humpries-Solis aimed to correct this market gap. To do so, she pioneered Constance Women’s Golf Apparel, named for her grandmother.
“I want to create women’s golf apparel that is high quality, high functioning, not overly sexualized, and made to play from a casual weekend golf round to LPGA tournament play,” Humphries-Solis says. “It’s meant for everyone and [for] helping women feel really confident on and off the course.”
This project has been long in the works: Humphries-Solis began thinking about it a year ago, respectively. However, a busy start to her senior year, four AP classes, and a fall sport made her project more difficult to focus on.
“[Senior Project] is forcing accountability on me,” Humphries-Solis says. “But being able to mix my passion for golf and also my passion for business, it was really important to me.”
Humphries-Solis plans to major in finance at the University of Miami next year, and she hopes to continue growing Constance Golf Apparel. After working with community sponsors and reaching out to manufacturers, she can see a future for her brand.
“My hope is that in 10 years, 15 years, I’ve created the female version of Travis Mathew,” Humphries-Solis says.
Humphries-Solis explains that with an emphasis on quality and ethical manufacturing, Constance Women’s Golf Apparel can make a big impact on the golf community and hopefully even make its way to the LPGA.
Adam Puljic – NYADI Podcasts
Adam Puljic is working to produce 5-7 high-quality podcast episodes for his project. Fittingly with this interest, he is also planning to attend Chapman University and major in documentary production and broadcast journalism next year.
Puljic says that he wasn’t initially drawn to podcasting. It wasn’t until a couple of friends, whose project is to host a podcast, introduced the idea and recommended that they all work together that he became interested.
“Jake [Petersen] and Sharjeel [Saqibuddin] invited me and it sounded like a ton of fun,” Puljic says. “A typical episode covers a range of topics, but recurring questions are ‘have you ever been in love?,’ ‘what’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you?,’ ‘what are you?,’ and ‘tell us a joke.’”
Puljic describes a typical day’s work to include planning, filming, and editing podcast material, then, if ready, publishing the episode on YouTube.
“We’re looking to get a good handful of professionally produced episodes published online,” Puljic says.
This goal has also forced the team to face challenges along the way.
“It’s been a lot of fun, but it hasn’t been without stress,” Puljic says. “A prank we pulled on a guest didn’t go as we thought, and provoked a lot of reflection about how we go through the process and [how] we want to represent ourselves online.”
Even with these ups and downs, Puljic says that he would absolutely recommend undertaking a Senior Project to any younger New Trier students considering it.
Kira Friedel – Chicago Sky Internship
Kira Friedel has always loved sports, particularly basketball. For her project, she is following this passion and working as an intern for the Chicago Sky.
Typically, after finishing some school work in the mornings in accordance with her modified project schedule, Friedel heads to the Sachs Center, located in Deerfield, Illinois, to help set up practice, work with the equipment managers, and do anything else she can to support the team. She says these experiences have given her more insight into different aspects of the sports world.
“I was trying to decide whether I wanted to go [into] physical therapy or business, and this has actually really helped me decide that I want to go sports management, business side,” Friedel says.
Recently, Friedel has worked on training camp for the Sky, managed shipments and inventory, helped with media day, and more. Throughout her work in these positions, Friedel states that the Sky has been a very welcoming community to her.
“They really are kind of like a family, and it’s really nice to see that they have [welcomed] me with open arms because I am a teenager and they could have just turned me away,” Friedel says. “It’s been such a cool opportunity to just watch them practice and see what it really takes to run a team.”
After this experience, Friedel says that she would love to work with the Sky again and speaks highly of her Senior Project experience.
“Especially for me, it helped me decide what I actually want to do for the rest of my life,” Friedel says. “It’s kind of like a once in a lifetime opportunity, and you learn professionalism, you learn how to be accountable—you learn all these amazing life skills that employers want to see from you when you come out of college.”
Between just three different students, the experiences and products arising from Senior Project show a lot of diversity. This is because students approach Senior Project with different interests, and the program helps them shape their ideas and visions.
“A lot of students come in with ideas already,” Van Den Berg says. “If they haven’t been thinking about it for months, they’ve been thinking about it for years.”
Anyone interested in learning more about one of the projects discussed above—or another of many in the works—can visit the exhibition on May 22 and witness the final products of these students’ hard work.
“What we do as project leaders is make it so that a student, with whatever capabilities they have, can show off their skills, their learning, their dreams, their passions, [and] their interests,” Van Den Berg says.