Independent Projects: A Meaningful Summer Learning Experience for Your Teen

Independent projects, at times called “passion projects”, are often service offerings students initiate to address unmet needs and serve their communities with their talents, interests, and energy.

Summer is a great time for your teen to take on an independent project because they have more free time and their target participants – often younger students – have more free time as well. Parents are very motivated to sign up their children if the offerings can take them away from the screen.

A service-type independent project can take many forms. It can be a science or robotics summer camp, a writing and debate workshop, dinner gatherings for a culinary interest group, or countless other possibilities. Each project is unique, as it’s shaped by the many choices the student creator makes.

Even though a project may start with a simple idea, turning that idea into reality often requires real effort. Your teen would need to design the offering, create flyers and/or short videos, spread the word, and work through unexpected challenges to make sure participants have a great experience.

As a result, an independent project can help students develop essential skills that may not get sufficient practice at school, including creativity, organization, problem-solving, and conflict resolution. Moreover, we shall not underestimate the inner qualities they help cultivate, such as confidence, care, patience, and perseverance.

In some sense independent projects resemble the experiential learning that universities increasingly value today. When colleges ask your teen how they’ve spent their time during high school, independent projects can help them stand out.

However, it’s possible that your teen fails to launch or complete their independent projects, and there can be a million reasons why. They can’t find an idea they like, they can’t attract enough participants, they have issues collaborating with their team members, or they run into problems they can’t solve while offering their service.

Setbacks put in focus what your teen needs to develop and many valuable lessons can be learnt. Whereas school work shows how good they are at learning, independent projects may point to how competent they are in doing. It may also signal what kind of functional career paths - for instance, marketing, operations, or R&D – would suit them better in the future.

High school is a low-stakes lab, and the more your teen explores, experiments, and reflects on their experiences, the more they get to know themselves.  Every challenge is an opportunity to grow, so I hope your teen will take on the challenge of an independent project this summer.