Senior Spotlight: Jack

Tell us a little bit about your senior project!

My senior project focused on plumbing. I was planning to talk just about city appliances, such as fire hydrants, or how water travels up a skyscraper, and stuff like that, but I also learned a lot about modern appliances. My project ended up touching on so many important parts of plumbing—including house plumbing and sewer systems. It's kind of complex but thankfully they had manuals posted online talking about everything involving sewer systems and rainwater management—so I was able to get a lot of information from them.

I also ended up taking an hour long trip to the Harold Washington Library, and because plumbing books aren’t really on the front shelves, they handed me this really old-looking book and it was simply incredible! It talked about all the detail and design put into simple pipes, to make sure water goes in and out without a hitch. Which is an area of plumbing that I've been sort of interested in for a while.

Is this a topic that you've always been interested in or was it newly exciting as you were brainstorming potential projects?

The idea for this project really sprung up this year. I wasn't sure what I was going to focus on, and then I remembered my experiences with plumbing. There was a plumber who went to my house and it took him a really long time to fix an issue we were having. And that ended up teaching me kind of what plumbing was like. Then it just spiraled that into a rabbit hole of information. It was quite fascinating.  

What is a memory or an experience that you've had here that you'll take with you after high school?

I honestly loved the Maine trip. Just the idea of going camping with my friends, and interacting with wildlife was really interesting. One of my favorite activities was exploring the tide pools. Tide pools are areas where the tide gets to its a low point. And we spent about an hour there with the goal to just find specimens and study them.

And I really enjoyed looking under the seaweed to see what cute little critters were there. I ended up finding a giant red crab. I was able to get it out, but it put up a big, big fight. Like…it would not let go. And then, eventually I just had to remove some of the seaweed that was in there.

What would you say your favorite block or morning lesson was during your time here?

I think my favorite curriculum activity were the service learning trips. I really enjoyed helping people out and learning what different places are like. I think my all-time favorite service learning trip was the New York one (Camphill Village Copake). We spent a lot of time interacting with differently abled people and it really expanded my horizons. And made me realize that I have a lot more, a lot, lot more to learn about the world.  

what will you miss the most once you graduate cwhs?

I’m going to miss the people here. I've made a lot of great friendships. I came from a really small Montessori school where my graduating class was only three people. With the transition to here, there were whole lot of new people and that really stressed me out early on, but ended up being the perfect amount.