With an upcoming deadline in December, seniors at West Henderson are finishing up mentorships and adding the final touches to their papers to complete their required senior projects.

Assistant principal Joni Allison said she believes the senior projects add a unique type of community outreach.

“It is a great way for for people in our community to come into our school and see the amazing things our students can do,” Allison said. “This is a time when they [students] can synthesize, piece together and show off all of these skills they have been learning for the last four years at the high school.”

Senior English teacher Emry Trantham said her room becomes a hub for senior projects during senior project crunch times.

“I try to keep them on deadline, help them with their papers, help them log their hours and keep all their stuff for them until they are ready to put together a portfolio,” Trantham said. “Coming up soon we will be doing slideshows, so I will show them how to do them, and show them what makes a good presentation. We will practice presenting to make sure they are fully prepared.”

Seniors can choose to do their project on any subject they want, from ghost hunting to ophthalmology.

“I chose to do my senior project on welding because I wanted to do something totally out of the box that reflected my strength and creativity,” senior Summer Shipman said. “So far it has taught me a new skill that I didn’t know I could do.”

According to Trantham, students should have almost completed their hours by now. Some students have expressed problems with this.

“My biggest struggle while working on this project was definitely time management,” Shipman said. “It takes so much time to be able to put your final product together, and just finding that time is really difficult.”

Allison, who has aided students in the past with their senior projects, said she knows time management is a widely felt struggle.

“A lot of times when I watch senior project presentations, students have to talk about what their greatest challenge was, and they will most of the time say it was the time management. It comes up again and again and again,” Allison said. “So (my advice is to) get started and don’t procrastinate, and do what your English teachers tell you when they tell you to do so.”

By: Allison Caskey and Zoya Zalevskiy, Feature Writers