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Over two years ago, members of LM’s Science Olympiad team were devastated to discover that their regional tournament had been canceled due to the emergence of a new virus: COVID-19. Two years later, on March 19, the Aces fnally experienced their frst in-person tournament since the unexpected cancellation in 2020. Over the past few years, LM Science Olympiad has faced many challenges. Meeting and competing virtually proved difcult for the team; without the opportunity to prepare their build and lab events, many members lost interest in the club. Additionally, integrating freshmen into the team was challenging due to the lack of spirit dinners and in-person meetings. However, there were some benefts. Traditionally, the team struggled in build events, but due to the virtual format of the 2020-2021 season, the team performed extremely well, placing frst at States for the frst time in history and coming in thirteenth at Nationals. Throughout the 2021-2022 season, the team has struggled with the return of build events. Co-captain Amy Huang ’23 says that “the biggest diffculty we’ve faced actually wasn’t the virtual format—it was the transition to being back in-person. After spending so much time competing in virtual competitions with heavily modifed event slates, transitioning back to our normal schedule with in-person competitions has defnitely posed some problems.” This March, the Science Olympiad team had a satisfactory showing at Regionals, placing second only to Harriton, and earning frst-place medals in the events Chemistry Lab, Codebusters, Experimental Design, and Ornithology. The competitors were all overjoyed and relieved to fnally participate in a “real,” in-person competition. “The experience was a ton of fun,” Nathan Donagi ’24 indicates. Huang describes that “it was great to be back in person and be able to greet other schools’ teams.” However, their performance was not good enough to be sure that the team would

Photo courtesy of Andrew Samulewicz

Photo courtesy of Anika Xi ’23/Staf

make it to Nationals. Just a single point separated LM and their rivals, Bayard Rustin. Because of the way Science Olympiad tournaments are scored, poor performances in just one or two events can drag a team down signifcantly in the overall rankings. Thus, team members focused on the events which didn’t perform as well at Regionals. “Most of our study events did well, but our builds dragged us down,” Donagi states. Many devices were completely rebuilt as the team rushed to improve as much as possible. On April 30th 2022, LM Science Olympiad participated in their frst in-person state competition since 2019. Many memories were made as the team played games, slept, and studied on their 4-hour-long bus ride. However, once the competition itself started, team members started to become anxious. When it came time for the awards ceremony to start, the team was instantly hit with a wave of excitement as they had placed frst in Anatomy and Physiology. However, as more results were announced, it became clear that too much had gone wrong for there to be any hope of making it to Nationals. The team ended up in fourth place, a mere four points behind Bayard Rustin. Although the team’s performance at States was not what they had hoped, the excitement of an in-person competition was unforgettable. “States was neither the optimal or expected outcome in terms of our placing but it was more than what could ever be anticipated in terms of a bonding experience,” team member Anika Xi ’23 indicates. But now, the Science Olympiad squad is more motivated than ever to work hard next year. Co-captain Noa Cutler ’22 expresses, “it’s really disappointing that this is the way our season had to end, but I also know that everyone on the team learned a lot from this experience and will come back next year even stronger and more motivated to win.”

Months have passed since the shocking passing of beloved Principal Sean Hughes, who died after a car crash that occurred while driving his thirteen year-old son to soccer practice. On March 10, there was a new development surrounding the tragedy. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, 54-year-old Azuka Ossai of Pine Hill New Jersey was arrested and charged with fourth-degree assault by auto. After Ossai drove through a stop sign in Winslow Township, he collided with Hughes’ SUV, ultimately causing his death and injuring Hughes’ son. Ossai has been released and will be subject to a detention hearing. When speaking with the Inquirer, wife Kristi Hughes expressed gratitude for the Camden County prosecutors, and that there was “a little bit of closure” in the tragedy. The LM community, still in mourning themselves, hopes to continue to be a place to honor Hughes’ memory. A recent way in which this has occurred was the many teachers and students who participated in the Broad Street Run on Team Hughes, raising money through sponsors for the Sean Hughes Children’s Fun. As participating physical education teacher Kyrie Michaud described, “Everyone here misses him a lot, so it was just a good time to come together, to remember him, to celebrate him, and to just challenge ourselves. to do something in his honor.

In his new role, Johnson vouches to listen and learn to determine what is best for the school. Some of his goals as principal include ensuring “the building is properly staffed for the fall and that our leadership team has a productive summer preparing to open school in September.” Sean Capkin, LM Spanish teacher and member of the committee that interviewed potential candidates for principal, mentions, “What underlied everything he said was connections with students and others.” A central point of Johnson’s transition to LM is his promise to listen to the community that surrounds him. Not only will he use these comments to implement new ideas, but to discover the areas of the school with the most room for growth. Johnson mentions part of his leadership strategy is to “work to do things with students rather than to them or for them.” He will lead by building strong connections with the student body, rather reminiscent of Sean Hughes’s tenure at LM. When instituting new policies, Johnson is prepared to handle confusion and backlash that might arise from the student body. Such as with changes in the library in the previous year, the student body was hesitant to adjust to new policies that were instituted by administration. Johnson acknowledges the fear behind change, but notes it is often the fear of change itself that drives nerves, not the actual policies. When instituting new policies, Johnson believes that “helping people understand the ‘Why’ behind change is very important because it gives framing and clarity for what is being proposed.” Anger from the library was mired by confusion as to whether there were substitutes or where to sign in. Auditorium assemblies or Advisory speeches could have easily cleared up the expectations and likely some of the anger. Johnson pledges to give both the what and the why to run a smooth operation once becoming principal. Since the passing of Hughes, LM has been left without a long-term principal in the main office. While Dr. Jim Scanlon has acted as an interim principal, Mr. Johnson will offer the security of a full time principal. Capkin believes that any “incoming school leader needs to take the temperature of the school.” Capkin affirms that, “Mr. Johnson will try to and want to honor Mr. Hughes as he was the culture of this building,” yet acknowledges that he is his own principal and leader. As seen through his various comments and ideas, understanding and communication are some of the central components of Johnson’s leadership style. While Johnson will come in with new ideas to grow LM, he carries with him some of the core tenets of Mr. Hughes’s philosophy: building connections is the key to building the school.

Continued from WELCOME PRINCIPAL JOHNSON! on page 1

Official newspaper of Lower Merion High School since 1929 www.themerionite.org Columbia Scholastic Press Assocation Silver Crown 2013 Editors-in-Chief Victoria Bermudez ’22 Caryl Shepard ’22 Jonathan Xu ’22

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The editors believe all facts presented in the newspaper to be accurate. The paper acknowledges that mistakes are possible and welcomes questions as to accuracy. Inquiries regarding accuracy should be directed to the editors of the paper. Editors can be contacted via e-mail at merionite@ gmail.com or in Room 200A. To represent all viewpoints in the school community, The Merionite welcomes all letters to the editor. Letters can be sent via e-mail or dropped of outside The Merionite ofce. The Merionite reserves the right to edit letters to the editor for length or clarity. All unattributed images are courtesy of WikiCommons.

Think before you speak: a message we often hear but rarely apply. Amidst the participation and protests in the aftermath of the George Floyd incident, there was an increase in political parley. But was it truly parley? Over the last few years, we have progressively witnessed aggressive language, hostility, and a lack of listening following proclamations of political perspectives. Although listening does tend to “go by the wayside” in periods of community crisis, we need to rise above COVID-19 to react properly, collectively to our greatest obstacles. Antagonistic responses to political opinions that do not align with one’s own are common, and unfortunately, the results—failure to inform of society’s needed changes, hindering justice promotion, intensifcation of political tensions—are destructive. Considering the social issues that exist not only in the United States but throughout the world, we cannot aford to have verbal outrage and over-aggressive social media posting when people are angered by the beliefs of their political opposition. People are signifcantly less likely to pay attention to what someone is saying when they are criticized, ridiculed, and tormented rather than engaged in a friendly, civil conversation. Only after an arguer begins to have a civil conversation can they start to persuade their listener. Recognizing this, we must make people aware of the importance of having constructive dialogue in halting the growing political divide. We can do this through advertisements, speaking out publicly, having these very conversations ourselves, and encouraging lawmakers to enact legislation requiring the teaching of intellectual charity. According to the Maine Department of Education, intellectual charity is listening to someone’s argument with precision, perceiving it in the best possible light by assuming it is well-intentioned. By treating other people’s arguments how we would want them to treat our arguments, we ensure that we have a clear perception of their reasoning, and ultimately, this helps us gain a deeper understanding of their argument so we can respond civilly and more meticulously. Those who express their discontent with passion and hostility often have good intentions; they want to help the opposition recognize the inequalities, environmental issues, and overall community problems that exist in the world. However, these people do not understand that their method of doing so is fawed. If one would like someone to consider and listen to their arguments, they must not have combative discussions, but instead, listen to the opposition and be open to changing their mind. The process of intellectual charity is a two-way street. There is no solving racial repression and climate change if we don’t take the time to have civil discourse with each other. With these discussions, rather than becoming further polarized, our communities can grow. That is precisely why it is essential that we, at LM, teach intellectual charity to students. Just ask English teacher Aimee Ferguson, who begins her AP Language and Composition course with a lesson on it. In a course that is structured around arguing, students must know how to properly do so. After all, we, as students, are the future. If we cannot listen to each other, then we must ask ourselves the feared question: is the future truly bright? Unsigned editorials refect the general opinion of the staf and not the opinion of any single editor

Dear Merionite Editorial Staff (and anyone who might take an AP),The title of your article in the March edition of this wonderful paper has it on the money. AP Classes are fundamentally fawed, and it feels like most of us had a sense of that already. Hoping to gain valuable skills from APs, or at least with the knowledge that harder classes are more attractive to selective colleges, many of us have ventured into the AP jungle. Navigating through AP Lang or APUSH, or AP Psych, similar snares tangled our trek. Ultimately, time consuming homework regimes and stressful grading sprout from the “mile-wide” nature of these classes. Precisely as your article pointed out, APs cram a lot of material into one class and AP tests force teachers to cover all of it. On the “inch-deep” side of things, the complex ideas taught in college classes (which APs are meant to mirror) typically end up boiled down to rubrics and bullet points. As John Tierny, a college professor of 25 years turned high school teacher puts it, “The courses cover too much material and do so too quickly and superfcially. In short, AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take [their] students down some path of mutual interest.” Tierny concludes, “The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.” Beyond their direct faws, colleges’ irreverent attitude towards APs (they hardly ever earn you a full academic credit) demonstrates the fimsiness of the College Board’s sell. APs simply don’t do what they are meant to do. Or, do they? I am writing this letter solely because of the last line of your article: “It is clear that the College Board needs to make a change.” To live up to their purported goals, it absolutely does. But in the College Board’s executives’ bigger picture, the AP racket is perfectly fulflling its goal. Between 2016 and 2019, the number of AP exams given per year more than doubled to 5 million. Selling that many $94 tests helped fund CEO David Coleman’s $1.4 million and President Jermery Singer’s $910,000

compensation packages. That money also goes to the College Board’s lobbying efforts. Over the last ffteen years, the College Board has spent a yearly average of $309,000 on lobbying to ensure local governments accept or sometimes even require AP courses. I bring up these innerworkings not just to emphasize that the College Board is fawed, but to expose how

it’s not particularly invested in a quality education, just a proftable one. So what now? We can lay bare the behemoth system’s machinations and blatant disregard for proper learning, but demanding that the College Board reshape their proftable model is futile. Instead, students need to appeal directly to the district. Afterall, LM could simply disband the AP program. In 2018, after colleges confrmed that AP classes have no bearing on acceptance compared to other challenging classes, eight prominent D.C. private schools did exactly that. Teachers in those districts are now empowered to focus on interdisciplinary research, current events, and question-based learning. “We expect this approach will appeal to students’ innate curiosity, increase their motivation and fuel their love of learning,” said the schools of the changes’ effect on their pupils. Thus, leaving the College Board behind entirely is one (and perhaps the only) viable solution to clear the AP jungle. However, such a drastic tack from the norm will require tremendous willpower. Unfortunately, due to the nature of high school, the grade with the most AP and institutional experience is constantly on its way out. Only with proper coordination can the underclassmen coagulate their power and truly fght to drastically improve our school. Perhaps, as suggested in my last op-ed, a student-led organization devoted to spreading awareness and lobbying the administration on Graphic by Emma Liu ‘22/Staf behalf of the student body as a whole is necessary. As storied at his memorial, Mr. Hughes took great pride in learning from other districts and pushing for innovative solutions. He believed in the prowess of his teachers and he trusted his students. To live up to Mr. Hughes’ legacy of love and educational best practice, it’s clear that this district needs to make a change.

After reading “attention is the beginning of devotion” in a Mary Oliver poem some time during my anorexia recovery, I was forever changed. Her prose was universal and enduring and made plain sense to a girl whose world had been complicated by an isolating pandemic and an even more isolating diagnosis. Once we notice things we begin to love them, and once we love someone we begin to notice them in the things we do everyday. It was clear to me, at least, that love is asking questions and caring about the answers. Love is attention. Therefore, attention-occupying “machines” like social media have indubitably led to a decline in our capacity to love with earnesty, dimension, and fullness. As we spend our time preoccupied with the false realities we create online, a veil is draped over our eyes, obscuring our collective perception of life apart from our screens. Our eyes glaze over at the sight of natural faces and bodies. We try to pretend this is less foreign than it truly is; but our attempts are futile. In the highly isolating and increasingly technologized world we live in, symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorders affect nearly 60% of young adults in the United States. Dr. Bryn Astin, a specialist in food policy and adolescent behavioral psychology, says in her New York Times op-ed that American youth’s mental health problem, particularly pertaining to eating disorders, is “way outstretching the capacity to address it.” The brain notices differences; it notices the breaking of patterns, the disruption of sameness. This is precisely why it is so easy to spend hours scrolling on algorithmic platforms like Instagram and TikTok; they give us the sameness our dulling brains long for that we cannot get out of corporeality. In the real world, people are constantly changing, constantly teaching, learning, and growing. Online, this change is apportioned; there is no room for non-homogeneity. Dr. Astin reaffirms what every teenager who’s suffered through ED Tumblr or quarantine fitness Tik Tok already knows: that this comparison plated by social media is killing us. In the United States, eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. And if comparison is the grave-digger, and desirability politics are the soil which buries us—the hundreds of thousands of us victimized by the corporate greed of private corporations profiting off of self-hatred and insecurity—then social media is the haunted hotel built foolishly upon these hallowed grounds. Five insecticide-doused red apples in a row are disrupted by a bruised banana with brown senescent spots. This disruption is consequentially noted by the brain as an intrusion. With enough time spent online, soon our realities of daily life— scarred stomachs, unaligned teeth, and bruised bananas—become the disruptions themselves. This acknowledgement becomes all the more indigestible when one too learns that it is the corporations themselves that practice and promote this unattainable uniformity. TikTok was exposed for telling its content moderators to hide videos that featured users who could be categorized as being “[of] abnormal body shape, chubby, obese, or too thin.” This isn’t anything new either. Zuckerberg’s first model of The Facebook, a website called FaceMash, was used to compare women from his school and publicly rate them; an adaptive form of stake-burning equipped for the digital age. It is foolish to assume that Facebook has, at its essence, changed at all from its misogynistic beginnings. In October 2021, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s damning claims, backed by internal corporate documents, demonstrated indisputably that the company’s app, Instagram, knowingly worsened eating disorders in teenage girls.

Despite this, these institutions are bound towards ruin, for they rely on the sorely misguided notion that we weren’t buried alive and fighting; that we’ve not spent all of our lives desperately scratching and clawing our way out. New York Times writer Lauren Slater writes in her piece on self esteem: “Feeling bad about yourself is not the cause of our country’s biggest ... social problems.’’ To this, I vehemently disagree. If we cannot cope with the realities of our bruised fruits, how are we to sustain ourselves as a species? If we cannot give our own bodies and selves due attention and love, how can we honestly give these to others? To the passions and causes that have been thrust upon us as a humanity? Psychiatrist Frantz Fanon philosophizes that “each generation must ... discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” How are we to discover our mission if we cannot even feed ourselves? How are we to confront the humanity-threatening objects in our sideview mirror (which are dangerously closer than they appear) if we can’t even stand to look in one? These questions are often overlooked in the political discourse pertaining to our “missions,” though this is not due to their lack of relevance nor our inability to answer them. It is rather that in answering these questions, we will not only come to understand the pertinence of love and attention in relation to ourselves, but in every facet of our lives; in our jobs, in our communities, and most radically, in our political action. To acknowledge this would be a consciousness revolution bordering on divine revelation—our day of reckoning. Though this is precisely why we don’t ask these questions, it is also precisely why we should. Between the climate, the pandemic, and devastation on the Ukrainian front, the bruises are unavoidable. Humanity demands love and healing, and therefore, it demands our attention— earnest, dimensional, and full attention. Though it is uncomfortable, it is essential, but without lifting the veil, it is impossible. If love is asking questions and caring about the answers, then the first step is to ask them, regardless of how daunting they may seem, regardless of what will change once we determine their answers.

$37,288—the average cost of tuition every year for a private college in Pennsylvania. Add on room and board and that totals to around $50,000 a year. Four years of that, and you owe $200,000. No doubt this is a large check to write, but is it worth it? To answer that question, I am going to take a financial approach. Yes, financial gain is not the only reason to go to college, but there are much less expensive alternatives to the college experience. So, if we’re looking at college as an investment, how are you getting the best bang for your buck? The answer: it depends. In engineering, for example, it does make financial sense to go to the best university possible. In fact, the top ten highest paying majors are all forms of engineering, with computer science in the middle. The starting salary for the students coming out of those majors is about $70,000 a year. So yes, if you want to pursue a career in engineering, MIT would be a good decision. However, there are a lot of people that have no idea what they want to pursue in college but enroll just because it’s the “normal” next step. That is the problem for me. People make the massive investment of time, hard work, and money to come out with a degree that 62 percent of graduates say has nothing to do with their job. That leads to a massive underemployment problem. There are more people who have degrees than there are jobs that will give enough salary to pay off those degrees. So if college is a bad investment for you, what is a good next step? Let’s go back to that extremely high paying computer science degree. Kenzie Academy is a coding academy, where you can get a degree and start working for the same pay as the college degrees in nine to twelve months for $10,000 to $20,000. Community college is about $2,000 to $5,000 per year, and the average student comes out making about $42,000, while college graduates make about $55,000 per year; the spread does not cover the cost difference of about ten times between the two schools. With so many alternatives, why are students still choosing to get a four year college degree? Well, if you take a look at any LM student’s Instagram feed, it won’t take you long to find the answer. The feed is flooded with senior college commits, and there is nothing wrong with celebrating the massive achievements of committing to a university, but the alternatives should not be shunned the way they are. Not following the college path is something of bravery and should be praised to help get rid of the stigma that going to college is the only option. It is a stigma that piles up loans on people, who only have a piece of paper to show for it. So I challenge you, who probably read this and thought “interesting buuuut not for me,” to think about what type of investment you want to make post high school and give some thought to the fact that it does not have to be a four-year college.

In December 2018, for Issue 3 of the 90th volMerionite article—an op-ed piece that, amidst blathering diatribes and extraneous history-digging, decried the action to discriminate against Asian-American applitone of its cocksure ninth grade author, characteristically stark and blunt: colleges were institutions of -

instead consider applicants under one “American

half years later and two dozen articles hopefully the traversing the bridge into higher education myself. National universities draw from a tremendously diverse and far-ranging pool of applicants, bisected into various regions, demographics, nationalities, and attributes. Even with standardized metrics, it is nearly impossible to compare an applicant from one corner of the US to one from another—hence introducing a variety of other factors to consider. Merit can be demonstrated in a plethora of ways, including classwork, awards, community service, technical enterprise, and leadership, but even then are scarcely comparable in the context of applicant pools eclipsing tens of thousands strong. merit” is, there is not a clear-cut answer. Moreover, institutions of higher learning aren’t bound to choose academic success, just as employers should not be delimited to hiring applicants only from top-ranked universities. Colleges seek to build classes that can requires more than just scoring well on a test. That’s shaky fulcrum upon which the rest of my argument rested. But it’s not just my opinions that drive this new interpretation—it’s also empirically proven. As I wrote in another op-ed entitled “Test-taking treachery” last year, standardized tests are incredibly poor predictors of academic success, and even the top universities who apply it concur. The 2020 University of Michigan study introduced in that article not only established that there was no meaningful correlation between scores and graduation rates, but there might even be a negative correlation. This is due to a phenomenon known as relative deprivation theory, best explained by Malcolm Gladwell via a Google Zeitgeist talk in 2019. Gladwell, having examined the graduation rates of STEM degree-seeking students across a wide spectrum of colleges, found that the bottom third of those students (based on SAT scores) at Hartwick College earned only eighteen percent of degrees awarded, meaning many of them dropped out. Rationalizing that this was due to Harvard, expecting a much better performance

percent of degrees. In other words, only one out of every two students in that third of students graduated with their desired degree, a pattern replicated across the board in essentially every university analyzed. The reality is that comparative position matters much more than absolute position, as Gladwell concluded, and thus academic persistence is not a function of cognitive ability but of individual characteristics and environment, rendering scores irrelevant after the admissions cycle. Therefore, when comparing applicants head-to-head, standardized scores are academic success and cannot be prescribed as the Yet even in the absence of standardized test scores, there is another gaping faulty premise in my prior opinion—the idea that race is the most decisive (and discriminating) demographical feature in shaping college admissions decisions. To bepetitive selection system is that it is inherently a other person’s loss—thus the system is designed to make most people disappointed at some point. The classic correlation-causation fallacy comes into efattribute their unfavorable outcomes to things outside of their control. The truth is that while

nationality, gender, race, location, rank—a given class breakdown is merely the result of a process incorporating many decisions and data points, not the determining factor for it. Diversity, whether we choose to like it or not on paper, is crucial to the institution of higher learning; just as it’s rational to understand why the male-female ratio is usually 1:1, it should not be hard to believe why colleges would want to create classes that simulate the racial diversity seen in the real world. Going to a university that merely incubates the same type of person you embody is not conducive to growth nor preparation for outpoint for colleges. In the context of Asian-Americans, for most top-ranked colleges, they are vastly overrepresented, contributing to around or above twenty of the US population. Is that demographically fair to begin with? Only those colleges can make that call. launched by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard that is now being heard by the Supreme Court, it is also worth considering what a blanket policy instituted by the Court would mean for college admissions. My guess is that it would likely not change a thing, if not make things worse. Understanding each applicant is an individualized process that incorporates a generous degree of subjectivity, and simply rewriting the challenged admissions codes with more constitutional lingo will not alter the way admissions they will play a role in shaping each college’s community. As analyzed by the Harvard Law Review, “there is no reason to think eliminating explicit consideration of race from the admissions process would eliminate the alleged Asian American penalty,” if one should even exist. Since the vast majority of universities are also opting to be test-optional now, this reinforces this point further. What’s more, a Court-

of Michigan in 2014, the ensuing classes witnessed a seventeen percent decline in the matriculation of students of color at the medical school, while only yielding a marginal increase in the number of AsianAmerican students. Imagining a similar impact across the board at all colleges across the United States, I think we can all agree it would not be for the better. The bottom line is that the admissions cycle is a bitter process, and only shows signs of growing more -

is ignorant of the broader truth that college admissions is a mere microcosm of the archetypal problem in economics: limitless wants, limited resources. No arrangement will be deemed completely fair nor result in an absolutely optimal outcome. As acceptance rates continue to plummet and colleges grow more selective ing cycle of students applying to more colleges to feel secure about admissions and consequently receiving more rejections is bound to ensue. It is completely understandable for applicants to feel that rejections should be grounded upon objective criteria rather than subjective, a sentiment I echoed myself, but unfortunately in the modern era of college admissions such is hardly possible. From a policy-based perspective, however, it is not only unfavorable but impractical to focus amendments of admissions on race, especially when there are so many other pressing problems that

meant to be the quintessential solution to improving vestments and reforms in public schooling at the pritive action can be considered a success at any college. tion can and should be settled upon consensus: we all should want a diverse environment of learning in which we can grow as both students and people, and incorporating diversity into college admissions is an imperfect but inevitable step for achieving that outcome, one that will ultimately be far to our benefit.

As a rising senior, my peers and I have begun to feel the pressures of college and post-secondary life commencing. This can potentially be a very scary and stressful time for those who don’t have ideas about what they want to do with their life. The LMSD Senior Project is, according to the LMSD Handbook 2022, “ an experiential exploration of a topic of interest to an individual student.” This entails that seniors end classes on May 6, 2022, in order to complete seventy hours of work for the project before presentations start on May 31, 2022. The senior project program should continue for future years at LM because it provides seniors with an opportunity to make a change in their community, it gives them career prospective, and it gives them time management skills. The LM Senior Project Program provides opportunities for personal growth, and can possibly have an impact on another person or community. An example of a senior project for personal growth could be to intern or shadow someone at a company or business within your desired field of interest. This could be a way for someone to figure out what they want to do or potentially lead them to a different career path than they expected. Current senior Lillie Abella explains that “allowing for seniors to explore any interest they have in a professional setting is a great way to be exposed to careers that spike their curiosity at the time.” Senior project helps give seniors a real world perspective on possible job opportunities. Another skill gained from the senior project is time management. Students have almost three weeks off to complete their actual project. However, many could procrastinate and not end up completing their project until the last minute. Cramming a project into just a few days would cause major stress to seniors and it would teach them to never procrastinate again. Thus, the senior project teaches seniors to manage their time wisely in order to make their experience worthwhile. Another reason why the LM senior project is a positive aspect of the senior curriculum is that many projects involve community service. Some projects that involve community service include offering to be a coach to younger kids, tutoring those in need, or cleaning up parks around the township. This is a way that seniors can make the community better while gaining a bit of satisfaction. I strongly believe that the Senior Project Program is beneficial to students. The program gives students meaningful insight into possible future careers. It also helps create necessary time management skills. Furthermore, some students can engage in meaningful communityservice. Inconclusion, not onlydoes it give seniors a more laid back end to high school, but it can also provide the opportunity to have a meaningful experience before they begin their first steps of adult life.