Week 0: A BIG Mishap

Hello reader,

My name is Sean Familant, a student from BASIS Independent Manhattan Upper. I’ve been at BASIS for about 7 years now, having attended it since the start of 5th grade. Throughout my time at BASIS, I’ve had to push myself in various ways, but I’ll keep myself from saying more, as I don’t want to bore you with all of that.

Instead, I think it’s best if we talk about my senior project. Obviously, this post, despite being for Week 0, has been posted much later than the others. The reason for this delay is what this post is titled: a big mishap. Before we get to that, I’d like to talk about my senior project a bit. I was unsure as to what I wanted to do for a senior project at first. Being given autonomy on the topic was both a blessing and a curse. Fortunately, with the help of my counselor, Mr. Tejada, I managed to decide on a project idea: breeding fish.

You may be spitting out your proverbial drink (maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration), but I assure you, I’m completely serious. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been around the hobby of fish keeping, and it’s been a pretty serious interest of mine. In middle school, after much begging and helping my dad with his tank, I managed to convince him to get me my own, albeit it was a small one. Over the years, I kept various things in said tank, including a killifish, a betta, and a snail. Once COVID-19 hit, I, like many others, lost a lot of motivation for the things I loved, including fish keeping. Maintaining my tank had become more of a hassle than anything, so I disassembled it once the fish I had in it passed away. With that, I had temporarily stopped my experience with fishkeeping.

Then, the pandemic loosened up. Around this same time, I began high school. With that, I had rekindled my love for fish keeping. I can’t quite remember what got me back into it, though I want to say it was my discovery of aquascaping. Aquascaping, for reference, is the practice of replicating nature by creating bioactive fish tanks. Regardless, I knew I was interested in trying fishkeeping again.

After over a year, and I do truly mean it took that long, I managed to convince my parents to let me set up a larger, more personalized fish tank. Instead of taking up space in the living room, I wanted this one to be in my room. Conveniently, I had totally coincidentally just renovated my room, which left a totally random, not-at-all-intentional empty space where a fish tank and a stand would fit perfectly. As you can guess, negotiations were successful, and I had gotten my hands on a 40-gallon tank by the end of freshman year.

After rediscovering my love for fish keeping, I’ve kept it up. I still have that same 40-gallon in my room. While I was looking for something to watch on YouTube, definitely to find inspiration for my senior project and not just have something on while I ate dinner, I saw a video from a channel called SerpaDesign (who is awesome by the way). In that video, Tanner, the channel owner, discussed how his fish were breeding in large numbers. A light bulb went off in my head. That was it. I was gonna breed fish. Fast forward a few weeks, and the mishap happens.

The school wasn’t able to let me run my experiment on site, and there wasn’t anywhere else I could do it on such short notice.

By then, it’s already been roughly two weeks after I’m supposed to have already begun my project. Admittedly, I was burnt out. I had just gotten through final projects for my capstone classes, and senioritis began to rear its head toward me. Thankfully, thanks to my dad constantly bringing it up (which certainly never got old) and my school’s encouragement, I was able to pivot and change my senior project instead of having to drop it altogether. Now, my senior project has a clearer, more straightforward goal. Instead of trying to breed fish, I’ll be investigating how local businesses, specifically pet shops, compare to chain stores. I figured I’d keep it related to my original project somehow, hence why I picked pet shops.

I plan to research various pet stores throughout New York City and New Jersey, and possibly other states in America, and compare the locally owned ones to the big name chains by what they sell, what their upkeep is like, how the store/location performs relative to others in the area, and whether there are any patterns, etc. I will do some interviews for this. My goal is to research a store every one to two weeks, recording data along the way, and be able to display trends and observations by the end.

I look forward to keeping you updated on my journey with this project, and I hope you’re excited for it as well.