Summer Project Ideas for High Schoolers
Summer is a great time to relax but also work on honing your academic and creative skills and have the time to really focus on one of your passions by creating a project. In this blog post, we will cover the benefits of engaging in a summer project as a high schooler and suggest different project ideas that you might want to pursue!
Benefits of Summer Projects for High Schoolers
You can gain a multitude of benefits by dedicating part of your summer to creating a summer project. Benefits include developing domain-specific skills, discovering more about yourself, and standing out to universities.
Developing Skills
Choosing a summer project that reflects your own passions can help you strengthen your skillset regarding a specific domain. For example, if you are interested in pursuing research in the future, choosing to do a research project over the summer can help you refine your research synthesis and analysis skills and even help you improve your ability to write research papers. If you are interested in the arts, summer is a great time to focus on improving foundational skills like perspective sketches or drawing croquis in busy areas. Furthermore, completing a summer project can help you bolster essential project-building skills that can be applied to other undertakings as well. Focusing on a specific project can help you improve your time management skills, your ability to take initiative to complete a project, your executive skills, as well as your capacity to focus and work on a single project at once. These are all skills that can help you succeed in other aspects of life as well, such as work or school.
Discovering Yourself
Summer projects also allow you to freely pursue a topic that actually inspires you so that you can learn more about yourself. During the school year, it can be difficult to start a passion project because of time constraints in terms of other extracurriculars like sports or time-intensive homework and studying. Thus, summer provides a great opportunity for you to pursue a project without the stress of academics and other extracurriculars as well. It especially allows you to discover more about your own abilities and interests. Perhaps after starting a small business project, you realize you aren’t very interested in entrepreneurship. Or, perhaps after volunteering at a summer camp, you realize that you want to work with kids in the future. Either way, summer projects offer you an opportunity to explore freely your own interests at your own pace.
Standing Out to Universities
Another advantage of summer projects is that you can demonstrate your dedication to a specific discipline and stand out to colleges. You can express how your interest in a specific topic extended even outside of class and your personal commitment to learning. Furthermore, if you create an especially outstanding project, you can also write about it in your college applications and talk about what inspired you to create the project and what you learned in the process, since completing a project can be very difficult and takes a lot of time and patience. Colleges really look for students who display personal rigor and discipline in all aspects of life, especially outside of school!
STEM Summer Project Ideas for High Schoolers
Here are some ideas for high schoolers that want to pursue a summer project in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics:
Create a research project about a local plant species in your area
Measure how fast food scraps biodegrade (link)
Build a simulation to calculate ozone depletion in your area or on a larger scale (link)
Construct a car that is powered by the wind (link)
Learn a new coding language and program a game with it
Build a solar panel that turns with the sun (link)
Determine how temperature affects a chemical called luminol (link)
Create an AI model that predicts future stocks
Art Summer Project Ideas for High Schoolers
If you want to dive into some artistic endeavors, here are some fun project ideas that can challenge your artistic skills and help you stay engaged with art over the summer:
Collect one thing from each place you go over the summer and create a character for each object
Go to a cafe and draw live sketches
Make a summer portfolio
Try a new medium that you have never tried before
Sculpt a cast of monsters out of air dry clay
Use playdoh or plasticine to make a stop-motion animation
Make a portfolio using Photoshop
Make a multimedia project about a social issue about which you are passionate
Create an animation about two household objects
Community Service Summer Project Ideas for High Schoolers
If you would like to give back to your community this summer, here are some project ideas that might give you some inspiration and help you find a project idea that envigorates you:
Help out at a local food shelter or homeless shelter
Volunteer at an animal shelter
Organize an environmental clean-up of local trails or nature areas
Plan a charity event like a bakesale or walkathon
Host a fundraiser event, such as a talent show or concert
Volunteer at a local nursing home
Organize a group of volunteers to plant trees in local areas
Volunteer at a local summer camp to help teach and supervise younger children
Entrepreneurial Project Ideas for High Schoolers
Another type of project you could begin is an entrepreneurial project. These kinds of projects test your business know-how and help you build the skills to be able to run your own company in the future! Here are some common examples of entrepreneurial projects that you could start in the summer:
Start a tutoring business
Sell handmade crafts like crochet keychains or fun bracelets
Sell baked goods online
Provide babysitting or pet-sitting services
Create a content creation channel like Youtube or a podcast and monetize using advertisements or sponsorships
Start an event organization business and assist others in planning gatherings and throwing parties
Conclusion
Completing a personal summer project in high school can be a great way to be productive during the summer and challenge yourself. It can also help you develop a variety of useful skills and demonstrate your interest in your future domain while also helping you experience new things. Summer projects can also help you stand out in college applications. That being said, completing a summer project is also a learning process to better understand your own limits. Make sure that you’re having fun and relaxing over the summer as well! Overall, summer projects are only helpful to the extent that they help you grow and feel inspired, so go at your own pace and choose a summer project that calls to your own interests and that you’re genuinely excited to pursue! If you want to learn more about some summer project ideas, check out this blog post on passion projects.
About Inspirit AI
AI Scholars Live Online is a 10 session (25-hour) program that exposes high school students to fundamental AI concepts and guides them to build a socially impactful project. Taught by our team of graduate students from Stanford, MIT, and more, students receive a personalized learning experience in small groups with a student-teacher ratio of 5:1.
