Freedom High School senior have been dedicating their time for the past three weeks to complete their Capstone Projects. Capstone is a program where seniors can complete a career or volunteer-based project during their last weeks of high school. Capstone organizer Christopher Weeks is responsible for the project.

To start off their Capstone project, seniors had to figure out what they wanted to do, which usually had something to do with their career, but it could also be volunteer oriented. Then students had to find a mentor, someone who could guide them in this project and assist them and teach them things they needed to know about the career they want to enter. Having a mentor was beneficial because seniors could see what a day in the life of their chosen career would look like.

 “Maybe you are on the fence [about the career you chose] and it gives students the ability to sit down with someone who works in that profession and you can get a sense of the job,” Weeks said.

Seniors did a variety of projects for their Capstone, such as shadowing people in their chosen profession, internships, volunteering projects and more. 

“So we had a lot of kids do several different things, we had kids, for example, they shadowed elementary school teachers in the community,” Weeks said. “We had students that worked for Dulles south food pantry, Dulles south soup kitchen, a lot of different things.”

For Academy students, they had to complete 30 hours in order to complete their project, and the rest of the students were required to do 60 hours, all in the span of three weeks. Out of the 500 seniors at Freedom High School, around 400 students signed up to do a Capstone Project. Capstone is great opportunity to explore a chosen career path.

 “It gives you an opportunity to study something that you are passionate about and it gives you an opportunity to explore a career path that you are interested in doing,” Weeks said. 

 It is not difficult to apply or do Capstone, because as long as there is a specific goal, a mentor and all the safety regulations checked out, seniors are good to go. It is a very simple way to explore something seniors are passionate about and gives seniors the chance to learn a lot.