 The class I'm in is called Research in Chemistry, and there are about eight seniors and maybe fifteen juniors. Dr. Halpin walked in one day and said, we've been accepted by NASA into this program and we're going to be exploring space adaptation syndrome. Well, space adaptation syndrome is actually a pretty big problem that concerns a lot of astronauts because when they go into space and come back, they feel disoriented in terms of balance. We hope to find out whether the fluid dynamics in the ear change the sort of signals the brain would be receiving and to see if we can discover why space adaptation syndrome is happening in the ears and perhaps see if we can do something about it. Well first Dr. Halpin presented us a project and pretty much gave us no boundaries and told us to really follow the research process, first hypothesize what's your research question and then say okay what kind of background information could I gain. And we split up pretty early on into three groups, one building the box and then two building the separate canal systems or ear systems. I was pretty much immediately taken from working alone into being a leader of a group. So it was a new experience to try like bring five people together and make sure that everyone was always doing something useful, something that was not counterproductive. Working as a team strengthens you in terms of you know you can have a lot of ideas shooting here and there. You can see so many different perspectives. At times we can combine two solutions together and create a nicer one for the problem. I've learned a lot doing this, a lot about being precise, there's not too much room for error and we've had to remake a lot of things a lot of times just because it was slightly off, didn't quite fit in the box right. I've also had more experience with actual like power tools like physically putting it together, physically drilling or physically making sure that the people drilling don't kill themselves doing so. The school has made me think that school isn't just about getting grades, it's more about learning. Once we constructed the model and the idea we had in mind really came to real life and actually worked the way we wanted to, that was really something that was really fun and exciting to find out with the laboratory component associated with every single course pretty much here and using being involved in doing so many kind of experiments and critically thinking about rather than what's happening in the experiment but we're actually answering why it's happening has really allowed me to learn science in a very unique way. Not too many students can say that they participated in building a project that went up in a NASA aircraft. Allowing high school students to really work in a project of this magnitude is something so unique to the school that I think that will not be offered in many other high schools.