By stephanie Vaccaro, Staff Writer
Most seniors at the Hun School in Princeton spend their senior projects off campus, but Sydney Dodson Nease instead chose to work on a project to help enhance the self-esteem of the 7th and 8th grade girls on campus.
Sydney, a Girl Scout since the age of 6, has been working to earn her Gold Award for two years. An employee of Girl Scouts USA, her mother suggested that she think about doing the Dove self-esteem program as her project for the award.
That, along with discussions with her faculty advisers led her to focus on this as her senior project.
”Each session is about something different,” she said. “The first one is about values, and what you value in your life. Second is about body image in the media. And it goes on to peer pressure and calming yourself down in stressful situations.”
She meets with the girls several times per week for the last month and a half of school. The senior project entails seeking faculty approval so students can pursue an interest that is academic in nature and them real world experience outside the classroom.
The self-esteem project has a set curriculum, but Sydney has really tried to tailor it to the needs of the girls.
”Sometimes I’ll tweak it a little depending on the group,” she said. “You don’t have to look like the people in the magazines to be pretty. You’re allowed to have your own point of view and perspective.”
The girls are learning to have a positive attitude, to be able to calm themselves down and to know that when they feel like they’re hitting rock bottom, things will only get better from there, she said.
”I learned that 7th and 8th grade is a very big step from one another, which I didn’t think,” she said. “Because some of the things that they have in the curriculum, the 7th grade gets very excited about, like they say ‘make sure you let the middle schoolers write on the dry erase board,’ which 7th graders love. But, for example, the 8th graders are like ‘eh, whatever.’”
”So, actually I feel like there’s a big step between the 8th grade and 7th grade,” she said. “And they have very different issues going on.”
The 8th grade girls are more hands-on, particularly with arts and crafts, while the 7th grade girls like to engage in discussions.
With the mindset of catering to the needs of each student, Sydney realized that the 8th graders were experiencing concern about transitioning to the high school. They’re worried about friendships and separation as more students would come into their class the next year.
”So I brought one of my friends who lives on campus who went to the middle school,” said Sydney of senior Anahi Ruiz. “She talked to them about the transition between middle school and high school. Even though it didn’t really have much to do with the curriculum, I thought it was something that … should be done because they really did have a lot of questions and concerns about it. So they talked about everything from friendship to how hard the work is, and what’s the freshman trip like.”
”We’re very proud,” said Ryan Egan, associate director of communications. “For Sydney to take on this project and make herself available to our younger students, it’s a nice way to see how much impact an upper school student can have on our younger students, and how our upper schoolers are role models to our younger students.”
Sydney should complete her Gold Award at the beginning of the summer.

