[Editor's Note: You can find the following story - and many others - in the Summer 2024 issue of Holderness School Today.] 

How is the war between Russia and Ukraine affecting global food security? How can schools better support children with dyslexia? How does the science behind motorcycle geometry and build interact with aerodynamics?

Believe it or not, all of these fascinating queries have something in common. Each is an Essential Question that drives a student’s Senior Capstone project – an intense, yearlong exploration that pushes Holderness seniors to dive deep into a topic that intrigues them.

“Senior Capstone gives students an opportunity to follow an interest and follow it hard,” says English Teacher and Capstone Director Sarah Barton. It’s an intensive project that all seniors are required to complete before graduation. That requirement, instituted in 2014, makes Holderness unique among its peer schools.

“For a lot of schools, Capstone is offered as a choice or an honors program,” Barton says. “Or they might have everybody do it, but it’s for three weeks or one semester or one quarter. We’re very unusual.”

The History

Senior Capstone is also unusual in its longevity. Senior Projects, in one form or another, have been a part of the Holderness experience since the early 1960s. In those first years, seniors who opted to undertake a Senior Project were released from their final month of classes to study a topic of their choosing. Over the ensuing decades, students took on a number of ambitious projects, from constructing and flying a primitive airplane to building a campus blacksmith shop to establishing a lighted loop along the school’s Nordic trails.

In one of the more audacious projects, Will Parish ’71 flew a Cessna 150 more than 6,000 miles across the country, starting near his home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, traveling south along the Mississippi River, east along the Gulf Coast, and then north to Washington, D.C. and Toronto. It was an epic adventure that took some convincing before school officials finally cleared him for takeoff.

“I learned all kinds of lessons that have been important for the rest of my life,” Parish said. “Number one was, if you want something, push for it. The second was to follow through.”

Those first forays into experiential learning provided the foundation for what became the school’s Special Programs: 1969 marked the start of Outward Bound (later Out Back), while Artward Bound and Habitat for Humanity (today’s Project Outreach) joined the mix in the 1980s. Today, all students take part in Special Programs during a two-week period in March. 

The Process

Although Out Back, Project Outreach, and Artward Bound last for a short period in March, Senior Capstone is a challenging, yearlong endeavor. Students choose a topic in the fall and then meet four times a week in their Senior Capstone classes, where they refine their topics and develop skills such as researching, writing, and public speaking. Over the course of the year, students will write a 10-page literature review, present in front of their peers every week, and interview experts on their topic. In many cases, those experts become mentors who help shape the student’s March Experience, when students leave school for experiential research - a hands-on encounter with their topic in the real world.

The Results

By the time students present their Senior Capstone projects to the Holderness community in May, they’ve undergone tremendous personal and academic growth. “The reward is just so fabulous when they're standing for 20 minutes to an audience of 40 people just beaming with pride,” Barton says. “No notes, no nothing.”

In some cases, a student’s Senior Capstone project fuels college study and career trajectories. But in every case, the invaluable skills they learned through the project – researching, public speaking, and persistence – pay huge dividends in college and beyond. 

“I get a lot of emails from kids in college saying, ‘My public speaking is far superior to everybody else's. I don't shy away from it,’ or, 'I know how to research,’ or ‘I was super well-prepared for my government class.’ Whatever it is, it was worth it.”

 

Capstone In Action
 

Henry Roe ’24

Essential Question
How has new technology in the aviation industry affected pilot training?

What drew you to your topic?
“There’s no feeling like just accelerating down the runway and taking off. I can't really explain it, especially when you're in control of it. You can't compare it – there’s skiing and mountain biking, which I do, but it’s just not the same. It’s completely different. It’s just that feeling and that bug that every pilot gets that kind of drives them.”

The Story
Henry Roe’s senior year really took off once he decided to study pilot training for his Senior Capstone project. He’d always loved flying, and had just begun taking lessons the previous spring in a 1960s-era Cessna. Eventually, he wondered: how is pilot training different in sleek modern aircraft that rely heavily on electronic displays and controls? To get his answer, Henry reached out to experts in the field of aviation to plan a whirlwind March Experience. First, he visited a private aviation company where he boarded a brand-new Gulfstream G500, a state-of-the-art, fully-computerized private jet with iPad-like touchscreens in the cockpit. He then spent a day at Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he toured a KC-46 tanker aircraft and sat in a flight simulator used for pilot training. He then flew across the Atlantic to Weybridge, England, where he toured a decommissioned Concorde on display at the Brooklands Museum. Even the supersonic Concorde, which first flew in 1969 and was retired in 2003, consisted mostly of analogue controls, Henry said – a measure of just how far aviation technology has progressed in recent decades. And while Henry’s Senior Capstone project ended in May, his learning won’t stop there: he’s headed to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in the fall where he’ll train to become a pilot.

 

Julia Feeney ’24

Essential Question
How Divided Are Church and State in America, and Why Should We Educate Ourselves on Our
First Amendment Rights?

What drew you to your topic?
“I was really compelled by this idea of how would we know if Supreme Court justices were truly not letting their religious beliefs persuade them one way or the other when coming to the decision about Roe v. Wade? And in that, I ended up also being able to study other things like ‘In God we trust,’ which is considered the U.S. motto, or the Pledge of Allegiance, which states ‘Under God,’ and learning how that actually was never in the Pledge of Allegiance to begin with. That really intrigued me.”

The Story
Julia Feeney ’24 had long known about the separation of church and state, an idea enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But for her Capstone project, Julia decided to ask: Just how separate are church and state, really? For example, how can one be sure that government officials aren’t making decisions based on their own religious beliefs? To answer that question, Julia began studying the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which states that Congress shall make no law “respecting an establishment of religion.” She then interviewed a number of experts on either side of the religious-secular divide, including Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, who leads the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire. She also interviewed Stephen D. Solomon, the author of “Ellery’s Protest,” a book about Pennsylvania student Ellery Schempp, a student who protested mandatory school prayer in the 1950s. That protest that led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision which found that compulsory school prayer violates an individual’s First Amendment rights. For her March experience, Julia - who hopes to study political science in college - wrote and illustrated a children’s book about Ellery’s case.

The book is her way of teaching a younger generation what she learned about First Amendment rights - a topic that she discovered anything but clear-cut. “I've kind of had to come to the conclusion that sometimes it's better to inform people about the history and what they should know, the things that I wish I had known, so that they can take a step and advocate for themselves,” Julia said.

 

Kaden Freelove ’24

Essential Question
Do energy drinks have an impact on our cardiovascular system and sports performance, and how are they marketed?

What drew you to your topic?
“I was driven to study this because of an incident that had happened at a local prep school that involved a sudden death and energy drinks. Pre-workout energy drinks grabbed my attention because I was kind of like, ‘Well, what is this actually doing to your heart?’ You see energy drinks all over campus here, whether it be Red Bull or Celsius.”

The Story
As a varsity athlete, Kaden Freelove had seen news stories of young athletes dying unexpectedly from sudden cardiac arrest. Last summer, he paid close attention when LeBron James’ son, Bronny, went into cardiac arrest at a basketball practice. While Bronny survived, Kaden was left wondering about the prevalence of Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) in young athletes, and how energy drinks are sometimes a contributing factor. “I see a lot of energy drinks in the morning, like at an 8 a.m. class,” said Kaden, who studied the connection between energy drinks, cardiac health, and sports performance for his Senior Capstone project. “I’ve seen a ton of them before games. Honestly, I’ve learned that consuming energy drinks before a game is actually very harmful.” To reach that conclusion, Kaden spent his senior year studying the effects of caffeine on the cardiovascular system (caffeine increases heart rate and blood pressure, and can trigger cardiac arrhythmias) and visited athletic trainers at Boston University to learn about proper athletic nutrition. To learn about the world of sports marketing, Kaden spent his March Experience interning at Gameface Media in Boston. As part of that brief internship, he wrote an article on the health effects of energy drinks for Six Minute Mile, an endurance sports newsletter with 700,000 subscribers. It was a hugely informative experience for Kaden, who plans to pursue business management at Boston University - and play lacrosse for the Terriers.
 

Anika Delli Colli ’24

Essential Question
"How is the overturning of Roe v. Wade impacting women's health?"

What drew you to your topic?
“I've always had a passion for women's rights, and I want to use my presentation to advocate for women's rights. I wanted to spread awareness on an issue that a lot of people don't know what's even going on.”
 

The Story
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the spring of 2022, it ended the constitutional right to abortion. Since then, dozens of states have instituted bans or restrictions on abortion - a national patchwork of laws that Anika Delli Colli set out to understand for her Senior Capstone project. Over the course of the year, she interviewed a number of healthcare providers in several states to determine the real-life impact of the court’s decision. During her March Experience, Anika traveled across the country interviewing healthcare providers, including an OBGYN in Wyoming, which bans abortion at 24-26 weeks; an emergency room doctor in Idaho, which has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation; and providers at an abortion clinic in Florida, where she also engaged in a dialogue with abortion protesters. “I feel like this is so important. This topic is so important to touch upon, and everyone should know about this,” Anika said. “Everyone should care about this topic, no matter what field you go into. I feel like activism will definitely be part of my life moving forward.”

Capstone Topics

With 85 students in this year’s senior class, Senior Capstone projects cover a huge variety of topics. Here are just a few of the Essential Questions students are asking: 

• What are the nutritional and health benefits of eating a farm-to-table diet?
   
• What are the impacts of artificial intelligence, and how is it evolving in the medical field?
   
• How does social media marketing use algorithms to target the audience,
  and what is the future of it?
   
• 3D print construction: Why is it revolutionary, and where is it going?
   
• How are food allergies affected by genetics, and how will treatments develop in the future?
   
• How are short-term rentals impacting the residential real estate market?
   
• What does avalanche protection and prevention look like?
   
• How do the cyclical changes in seasons negatively impact the mental well-being of residents in seasonal towns?