By Reese Velishka
At Greenwich Country Day School, many pieces of the curriculum are unique, but perhaps one of the most important and beloved by students is the Junior Thesis, and the long process that goes into producing it.
The Junior Thesis allows students to dive deeper into a topic they are interested in or passionate about. Students choose a teacher, someone who is well-educated on their topics, to be their mentor over the three-month process. “The purpose of the Junior Thesis is to teach kids how to produce college-level work at a young age,” Joe Perry, a Botany, Archeology and history teacher said when asked about the purpose of the Junior Thesis.
Theses topics cover an extremely large spectrum of disciplines, topics vary from, “The Difference in Soil Microbial Communities and Regenerative Agriculture” to “The Mental and Physical Aspects of School Stressors.”
Eight junior students commented on how valuable they thought the writing and research process was to their academic growth during their junior year and how they felt they had experienced writing a college level paper at 16 and 17 years old. Students also said the process of defending their thesis in front of a board of faculty was useful to gain a full understanding of their topics.
The Junior Thesis is concluded every year with Junior Thesis Night where all junior students present their hard work through a poster display. The GCDS Hallways are covered with posters that display the hard work of junior students. Students create and display their posters weeks before Thesis Night and do not take them down until the end of the school year. Be on the lookout for the full article in next week’s edition of the Greenwich Sentinel.
