Senior Year
A Bridge to Bright Futures
The unique senior-year experience at BASIS Independent Schools is defined by students’ agency, inspiration, motivation, and future goal-setting. After meeting graduation requirements, seniors may progress into Capstone courses, which serve as bridges between high school-style learning and college scholarship. Seniors explore potential topics as possible majors and career tracks, while also cultivating intellectual passions and pursuits that will shape them as learners and leaders in college and beyond. As a result, our students enter college prepared to excel.
Senior Year Highlights
Capstones: Diving Deep into Self-Driven Learning
Capstone courses complement the breadth of our BASIS Curriculum by adding even more depth, delving into advanced material. From Linear Algebra to Special Topics in Neuroscience to a humanities course called Gunpowder and Pandemonium, and more, students can dive deep into various disciplines that offer exposure to course content and a classroom structure typical of college and university settings. The goal of all these Capstone Courses is to propel students’ self-driven learning—equipping them with independent research skills, the drive to use them, and the ability to identify and articulate specific lines of inquiry. Ideally, those questions will develop into Senior Projects that students can pursue during their final trimester.
College Counseling: Daily Coaching for Future Pathways
Starting in grade 9, students are introduced to college counseling, which includes everything from essay writing to financial aid paperwork. That support ramps up during senior year, when students take a daily College Counseling course for their first two trimesters. This concentrated time together allows our college counselors to get to know students well, help them focus their intellectual passions, determine what college options align with their personal, educational, and professional goals, contemplate majors, and ensure they have plenty of support as they prepare their applications.
Senior Projects: Innovative Ideas in Action
The Senior Project is the pinnacle of the BASIS Curriculum: Spurred by their passions and curiosity, seniors pursue a long-term, off-campus research question of their own choosing, designing a project for their final trimester that draws on their research, writing, and analysis skills. The objective is to produce a significant piece of scholarship, whether the result is an academic paper or something they have designed and built. Upon project completion, students are awarded the High Honors Diploma—the most prestigious diploma offered by BASIS Independent Schools. As the culmination of years of thinking and hard work, a completed Senior Project is more than an impressive achievement. This milestone also reflects that students are ready to succeed and thrive in college and beyond.
