Polly Finch | Staff Reporter
Every May, regular classes end early for the seniors in order for them to pursue their Senior Projects, a tradition that second semester senior teachers welcome. Senior Projects are a way for seniors to pursue their passions through a specific application process to pick a project ultimately culminating in a final presentation. Before the presentations begin next week, we want to preview a couple interesting senior projects.
Senior Malia Bates has taken on an internship with a Giants sports reporter. She has been given passes to the games and is able to go the pre-game meetings with the team manager along with shadowing the reporter. Bates’ investigation has inspired a special interest in the presence of females in sports journalism. “I’m also doing a lot more research on women sports reporters and I had the chance to interview some as well. Some [of them] were the first to go in the locker rooms,” Bates said. While a lot of progress has been made in women’s reporting, Bates has learned that there is still a lot of discrimination against women in the sports world. “There are people, occasionally, who don’t think that women should be in the locker room. The best piece of advice would probably be that if you know [being a female sports reporter] is what you want to do, keep going because not everything is going to be easy, and if you are good at it, you’ll succeed,” Bates said.
Ben Taft and Gil Kornberg have continued their work in their entrepreneurship engineering class for their Senior Project. Throughout the year, the two have been developing The Link, a bluetooth device that plugs into an audio outlet, and then connects to a phone, making any device wireless. “Our senior project is basically taking the prototype that we spent so long designing and bringing it to market via Kickstarter. The way we are going to create a campaign is a Kickstarter video to get people to pledge money to reach our goal, which for us is 50,000 dollars to manufacture and sell them,” Taft said. While it seems like a high goal, both students have high hopes for their project. “We believe [our goal of 50,000 dollars] is very realistic since there are similar products on the market that have tripled their goals of 50 or 60 thousand dollars, so we believe we can,” Kornberg said. They aren’t just using Kickstarter to market their product either. “We are doing a lot of marketing ourselves, getting in touch with a lot of tech blogs, making a lot of phone calls. We’re really pushing it out there,” Taft said. “We will also be going to music festivals, Shoreline [concerts] and things like that where there will be a lot of young people. Just advertising our product and getting the word out,” Kornberg said. Because their product is geared towards a younger crowd, they have adjusted their marketing plan accordingly, by adding in humor to their Kickstarter video, and having The Link be at a very affordable price.
For her Senior Project, Lindsay Karle is training her dog, Thor, to be a therapy dog. “[He will] join me in meeting with children who have reading difficulties or have trouble speaking aloud, whether it be in English, or a different language,” Karle said. She sees the importance in working with children to make them strong, confident speakers and how this new found confidence will impact them for the rest of their lives. “It’s awesome having a non-judgmental audience to speak to, it can really benefit people,” Karle said. Karle has been working on developing relationships with the children she works with, and is finding the work extremely rewarding. “This is really important to me because when I was younger, I developed a comfort and love for reading by practicing reading aloud to my dog. To this day, I practice speeches to Thor before a listening human audience,” Karle said.
Seniors Max Zats and Carter Burgess are also continuing their project from their entrepreneurship engineering class. The seniors are continuing their work on an interactive website called Menlo PlanIt. “PlanIt is a four year schedule planner for students, and also an online course catalog,” Zats said. PlanIt allows students to efficiently plan out all four years at school, taking into account arts, sports, and community service requirements. Because many students feel like course signups at Menlo are not very efficient when it comes to planning out their four years, PlanIt will help with the clarity of the process, and also help students think and plan out their courses well in advance. “We’ve been working on updating the look and feel of the site, and generally enhanced its overall performance,” Zats said. Burgess and Zats have both been working very hard throughout the year to modify the site in order to provide the most usable and beneficial product to the Menlo community. “Stuff like this, there’s a million features you can add, […] so its really never finished,” Burgess said. While the redesigning process takes a lot of work, both students believe that the site will dramatically enhance the process of signing up for classes, not only to be utilized at Menlo, but at other schools as well.
So come check out Senior Project presentations from Wednesday May 18 – Monday Jun. 2 to see what interesting passions Menlo seniors have pursued. To learn more, below are links to two projects mentioned above. The last link outlines the schedule for all senior projects.
The Link (Ben Taft, Gil Kornberg) – vibeaudioinnovations.com
Menlo PlanIt (Carter Burgess, Max Zats) – https://planit.menloschool.org:9443/
Senior Project Presentation Schedule – http://www.menloschool.org/live/files/759-senior-projects-presentations-final-schedule
