With her senior year looming, Katherine Ricaurte, Monument Mountain High School, Class of 2015, wanted to do something that would make it truly memorable – what better way than using her WISE project to do precisely that? Katherine was a writer, and she and her best friend decided that they would make a film, a fictional account of their high school years:  “The humorous film would tell the story of our class, and our 4-year journey through Monument.” It would not only be fun for them to do but fun for all their classmates to see.

Like most WISE projects, their project morphed as they got into it, and their title reflected that change. They decided to focus the film on their senior year alone and counted up the number of days in that year, weekends included: 281 days. That immediately became the title.

The Importance of a Mentor                                                                                                             It was, of course, an enormous undertaking. And there were times when it seemed doomed to failure. What kept Katherine going?” My mentor was my emotional rock as well as a great source and guide,” Katherine said. Putting together an entire film in one semester turned out to be more than just a little challenging, but her mentor helped her deal with the challenges. When her always high expectations induced far too much stress, her mentor worked with her to adjust them in a way that allowed her to achieve even more than she had first anticipated. And when, inevitably, the entire project would seem impossible to achieve, her mentor supported her through the bad patches and kept her going.

The Power of a Putting Together a WISE Presentation                                                There were many wonderful outcomes to this project, but Katherine found that preparing for her presentation was perhaps the best of all. Sitting there, going through everything she had done, trying to figure out how to convey the enormous amount she had learned truly crystallized things for her.  She had started by designing her project around her real passion for writing and creating. And then, at the end, she looked back and was struck by what she had gained from it: “You don’t really process how much you have learned until you are sitting there, flipping through your brain -and your JOURNALS- and trying to put together a presentation where you must teach your audience.”

Changing Paradigms                                                                                                                        Katherine went into the project a writer. And while she emerged from it a writer with all sorts of ideas for future writing endeavors, she learned that screenwriting was not one of them. WISE is perhaps at its most valuable when it teaches you what you DON’T want to do. But it also has the great value of exposing you to things you might not previously have considered. Katherine learned, among other things, that directing, perhaps for film, perhaps for television, was something that was a definite possibility for her sometime in the future.

Words of Advice                                                                                                                                Katherine was happy that she had selected something she loved as her project. She advises all incoming WISE students to do the same: “You have no idea how much this will affect your project’s outcome, but, more importantly, your motivation.” Among the other tidbit she had to offer from her own learning curve, the importance of adjusting expectations to make them achievable; the need for time management: “You never have as much time as you think.” And, at the end, as she discovered when she pulled everything together for her presentation and saw the vast amount that she had actually learned, “Make sure you have learned something.”