50 Years of Senior Project

The Senior Project program at Moorestown Friends turned 50 years old this spring. This past May, members of the Class of 1972, who piloted the program during the third trimester of their 12th grade year, arrived back on campus to celebrate their 50th reunion – just as members of the Class of 2022 were departing for their Senior Projects.

During their final year at MFS, 38 members of the Class of 1972 decided to participate in the Senior Project dry run, which was optional. Remarkably, the parameters and goals of the program are much the same today as they were then – except that in 1972 the project ran for eight weeks. Today it is one month long, during May and into June.

The December 1971 edition of Moorestown Friends News described the goal of the program as enabling “each graduate to have mastered the process of becoming a self-directed, self-motivated person who has learned how to learn from and trust their own  perceptions and encounters with the world and fellow human beings.” Projects were expected to “provide a final opportunity for many students, with the careful supervision of the school, to refine and test their own skill in utilizing learning resources which are not available in this or any other school community…”

The original program, conceived as a work-service off-campus experience, was coordinated by a faculty steering committee. Each student was required to submit their project for approval, and recruit a faculty advisor to oversee and ideally visit them at the  project site. The student was required to communicate weekly with the advisor, and keep thorough notes on the project in order to be able to reflect and report to classmates.

In July 1972, the school’s newsletter reported that students and teachers were enthusiastic, and the experiment had been a success. The hope going forward was that “…the seniors (would)  take advantage of this opportunity to try new things; to use aspects of their minds and personalities that the school could not challenge on campus; to discover strengths where they did not know they existed previously; to test the degree of their interests in areas where they have been inexperienced up to this point; and to grow in new and different directions.”

Alumna Melanie Beth Oliviero ’72, now a Principal at Strategies for Social Change and living in Winnipeg, Canada, recalls her Senior Project of 50 years ago fondly. She went further afield than the program’s originally suggested 200-mile radius, traveling to  France to improve her spoken French. She stayed with former MFS French teacher Patricia Messing. They have maintained a lifelong friendship, and Melanie’s globally-oriented Senior Project foreshadowed her career in international social justice work.

Today’s Senior Project program continues to provide students with hands on introductions to careers across a wide spectrum of workplaces, with projects often hosted by MFS alums, parents of alums, and current parents. For many students, making  arrangements for their Senior Project is their first experience with networking and discovering the power of making connections through the MFS community. 

Alumni News