I go to a high school in Northern California and for my high school Senior project I’m thinking of doing it on the topic of child abuse, fast food, the homeless, or photography.

To pass Senior English we need to do the following for our project: Choose a topic, make a question based on the topic that will catch a reader’s interest, get someone of that specific field of your topic to be your mentor (cannot be of any family relation) and watch your progression and sign off on your accomplishments, have at least 15 hours of work on your topic outside of school, make a 8-10 page paper with your research, studies, outcomes, interviews, and works cited, and lastly have a 8-10 minute presentation (in proper business attire) in front of any 5 staff members in the school who will grade you on your performance showing what you learned, how interesting it was, how it affected you, and your passion toward your project.

I know, it’s kind of a lot of things to do in a Senior project, huh!? But would anybody be nice to give me some project ideas that have to do on child abuse, fast food, the homelss, or photography, and how can I go about getting a person who works in that field to mentor me, and how would I go about working the minimum 15 hours of service?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

I would start with finding a mentor who will work with you. Then everything else will fall in place. If you don’t know anyone who will and are starting from scratch, your best bet will probably be finding some one to mentor you who works with the homeless.

Working in the area of child abuse brings up problems of confidentiality. Of course, if you know someone doing that work or if you could become a big brother / sister, that could work.

It would be hard to volunteer or do community service in fast food.

photography would also be harder to find a mentor or do community service. If you want to try, you might want to try a newspaper photographer who would work with you on a historic restoration or revitalization or other project of significance.

Once you have found your mentor and a place for community service, start your research. Come up with your question. Ask what difference would it make in ___ if ____ is done.

Use pretests or statistical info to measure how things are now. This is something you can find in statistics for your area in public records or something you can count. If you are working with children, you could use their grades, school attendance and discipline record, etc. With homeless, you could do something with percent of the group that has been homeless for what period of time or an attitude survey of the homeless or of the people who work with them or the neighbors.

Your project should begin with measuring something as is, applying some act, and then measuring again to see what difference the act made.

Getting that good mentor is most important. You might also ask your teachers to show you examples of good projects former students did. But don’t copy too much! This is your thing!

Be aware that this is the kind of thing that can change your life–and the lives of others!

Go for it!
You can even make up your own test of opinions (for example,

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