Senior Projects
Senior projects are independent studies that offer seniors the chance to achieve a goal or pursue a topic of their own interests. This past year, seniors had the opportunity to do nearly anything they wished, with the supervision of faculty advisers and the commitment to fit extra work into their schedules.
One senior project involved writing a textbook. Three seniors, Eric Regis, Lydia Wickard and Darius Shi set out on this ambitious endeavor together. It included three 90-minute lectures on quantum mechanics and three more that were open to the entire campus. They also wrote an 11-chapter textbook and the analysis of student feedback.
For Regis, Wickard and Shi, the project was extremely educational, more so than they originally thought when they started writing back in February. Theories, facts and ideas that were supposed to be the backbone of the textbook were modified and proved wrong by further research and discussion as they learned more and took advantage of more resources.
“We took on an ambitious amount of work; I think if we’d started preparing earlier in winter term that would’ve made the project feel less rushed.”
Shi described the process as “not linear at all” and provided an example of a major change that he had to make mid-project. “When writing about general relativity and curved spacetime, I first assumed that the necessity of curved spacetime arose from the fact that the strength of gravity varied when we move around in the universe. But later after talking with a Harvard physics lecturer David Morin, I realized that even a constant and uniform gravity would curve spacetime. This key realization prompted me to add five pages to chapter six of the textbook and also raised new questions about black holes that I am still thinking about now.”
The workshops and discussions that were prompted by their presentations allowed them to modify and develop the textbook.“The workshops break our naive optimism and allow us to see the issues of some explanations. We often gather after the workshops to discuss and amend some material,” Shi said. Using various feedback and research, the textbook is still a work in progress and will be completed over the summer.
While it was an entirely collaborative project, Shi wrote most of the chapters, with the exception of one chapter on a geometrical viewpoint of relativity (inspired by a book on the same subject). The group has about 150 pages completed out of a total of 200 pages.
A main goal of senior projects is to make information accessible and comprehensible to all audiences. The final product aims to provide a full understanding to the audience of the students knowledge on the subject. While extremely knowledgeable in physics, Shi, Regis and Wickard found it difficult to convert their findings into a form which would be easily presented in a textbook. “I had to think about ways to explain some classical results without mathematical jargons so that the layman can understand,” Shi said.
Regis discussed the narrow margin that the group had to get it just right. “We had to strike the right balance. We wanted to cover concepts that would be new and exciting to the audience, without being opaque and inaccessible,” he said. Based off of informal student feedback, they succeeded in making a very tough topic as accessible as possible to all audiences through their informative workshops.
Another challenging aspect of senior projects—especially if they are collaborative—is finding times to meet together as a group to discuss and plan ahead. “Because our workshops are on Sundays, we do most of our work outside of the format our senior project is schedule,” Wickard said. “Each week, we divvied up the presentation material (usually each person talks for about 20 minutes in each workshop) and prepared both independently and collectively,” she continued. They struggled at times to stay on track with such a long term project, but were able to pull through together.
The group admits that the project got stressful at times, especially with their heavy workload at Exeter. Shi didn’t start writing the textbook until February. Wickard said, “We took on an ambitious amount of work; I think if we’d started preparing earlier in winter term that would’ve made the project feel less rushed.”
While Shi agreed with Lydia, he felt as if preparing early would not have been possible given the term-long time frame provided for senior projects. Shi said, “The reality is, senior project is one-term long.... Our project literally takes more than a year of work (judging from how many hours we put in every week right now and how far away we are from our goal).” They are still optimistic though, in finishing their project over the summer with the same commitment as they had during the school year.
Reflecting on what the group could’ve done differently, Shi said, “I have also thought about doing more publicity. Turnout plummeted after the first workshop. We need better advertisements.” This is a common problem with many senior projects. Many Exonians do not have enough time in their busy schedules to provide the attention that a senior project requires for success.
Senior and head of the Robotics Club, Aneek Muhkerjee, took another approach for his final term at Exeter. He designed and built from scratch a robot which can avoid obstacles and follow a target. He has spent the entire spring term working on this project.
Muhkerjee has been interested and and involved with robotic competitions since middle school, but never had an opportunity to build a robot from scratch for a real-world purpose. “I’m very grateful for Exeter for giving me that chance. I’d originally heard about this option from a senior in my dorm, and I’ve been planning it since because the level of experience and education that one can get from formulating and working on an entire project from scratch to completion felt more valuable than any class to me,” Muhkerjee said.
Muhkerjee found difficulty closer to the beginning of the term, during which he had to deal with materials on his own that he’d never managed before. “While it’s been a term-long project, my project required a lot of work and time outside of class to source and purchase materials, learn to work with materials like sheet metal that I had never used before, and so I definitely had a slow start.” Muhkerjee said.
Yet another form of the project was done through film by senior Sean Taylor, who put together a collection of videos documenting select students’ favorite memories during their time at Exeter, which he showed in the forum at the end of the term. “My project is called ‘True Exonian Stories.’ In my four years here, I realized that what makes Exeter special more than anything else is the stories that people have, and I wanted to capture that on film. So I picked several people in the Exeter community and interviewed them about a funny story they have,” Taylor said.
Taylor dealt with this issue through dramatic reenactment during which he had subjects either play themselves, or in some cases, other people act out different scenes as a way to demonstrate the stories he follows on film. These scenes provided clarification for the audience so that viewers could fully grasp the special stories seniors had to share.
Similarly, although Taylor knew his documentary would be a heavy task, he didn’t expect the workload for seemingly simple aspects of the project such as lighting and camera angles to be so difficult. “Even though I came into it very motivated and ready to work, it’s a lot more work than I anticipated. I’ve definitely gained a lot more respect for small-time filmmakers from this project. It’s very difficult to put everything together yourself, especially getting other people to volunteer their time on it when they’re not getting anything from it,” Taylor said.
He added, “It’s really difficult work, and although I’ve spent a lot of time trying to organize it, I wish I had even more time and resources to complete the project. But I’m happy with what I’ve done.”
Seniors are encouraged to partake in senior projects as they are useful tool for students to transition from the end of their high school career and study in further depth what they love. Muhkerjee concluded, “going into these last few weeks though, I definitely loved working on this project and putting in that effort, and I would definitely recommend considering this option for any senior who really wants to get some first-hand experience in something they love.”