Millikan High School is home to the five pathways, COMPASS, MBA, PEACE, QUEST, and SEGA, each offering a unique opportunity for students. All of these pathways provide a capstone or experience for their seniors that acts as a culmination of all the things students learn while in their pathway. So what exactly are the senior capstones and projects?

MBA

MBA’s capstone is, “A course where each class period comes together to build and operate their own fictitious business,” says Ms. Valdez, MBA’s senior capstone teacher.

Running like a real-life firm, every student in this class submits a realistic resume, applies for a job within the business, and gets paid in virtual dollars to complete their job’s task. There are even different departments such as accounting, graphic design, human resources, sales, and marketing, as well as competitions each class can take part in.

Kalani Burke, MBA senior, said, “Working in this class is basically setting us up to have team building [skills], work with a department, and then have individual tasks you have to work on to help succeed with the company.”

Ms. Valdez shared that many students who’ve come back to her once they’ve graduated talk about how their time in the class greatly related to their real-life experiences within the business environment.

QUEST 

QUEST capstone is the QUEST Senior Project: “a student driven, research and community focused project where students identify a community in need, an issue within that community, and then they create and implement a solution for that problem or issue,” states Ms. Tubbs, QUEST Pathway Lead and capstone teacher.

“We really think of this project or course as bridging the gap between the academics we need for college, but then also the life skills that we need,” says Ms. Tubbs. Students gain these skills through speaking to community members, approaching businesses, sending emails, and more in order to set up their projects and solutions.

Throughout the year, these accomplishments are tracked through a portfolio that documents their project, including all the hours spent on their project, money raised, and items donated to organizations. 

QUEST senior Sofia Arzola said, “Taking this class was a really nice way for me to get deeper within my community and feel like I’m actually making an impact and actually doing something important.”

SEGA 

SEGA’s capstone project is split into two parts: an individual project where students can research whatever interests them and a group project where students design a game or app that aligns with a curriculum presented to them.

The individual project takes students through the engineering design process while allowing students to focus on their interests. During this project students get feedback from professionals and can revise their work from there. Students place their work in their ePortfolio which they began in 9th grade and finish during this class.

This year, the group capstone project is in partnership with the Women’s Shelter of Long Beach. The Women’s Shelter presented the class with the curriculum “Building healthy relationships” and each group worked on designing and developing a game or app that taught this curriculum to others. Within this group project, students learn the values of teamwork and come together to create one design.

“With the SEGA [project] it’s a lot of learning how to program, learning how to organize projects, and it’s teaching you for college,” stated SEGA senior Xavier Padilla. “They don’t hold your hand through college, they just give you a set of deadlines and they expect you to do all the work by the deadlines. So I think with Mrs. Becker’s format for the class, she’s having us do that.”

“The fun part [of this capstone] is that you experience the different jobs within video game production… so you understand why you learned about game design, game development, animation, marketing, production and how games and simulations can help other people,” says Mrs. Becker, SEGA Pathway Lead and capstone teacher. “[Students] see the broader appeal of what they can do with their talents.” Taking this senior project allows students to put together all the skills and lessons they learned throughout their time in SEGA into one cohesive experience. 

PEACE 

The PEACE capstone is a class that brings together all the things students learn in their time with PEACE.

Originally there was a specific PEACE project, but other classes such as Government and Economics have developed projects that included aspects of the PEACE project. In order to avoid repetition among senior classes, PEACE does not have a designated project like the other pathways’ capstones.

“[Government & Justice in America] is meant to serve as the culminating experience of PEACE,” says Mrs. Cruz, PEACE Pathway Lead and capstone teacher. “Senior year is meant to say, all of those strategies and all those skills and all of the content that you’ve learned throughout your years in PEACE, how do we apply that moving forward to be a participatory member of society.”

PEACE senior Sadie Brown says, “You really get to take all of those skills that you’ve learned throughout these past few years and put them all together to get a deeper understanding of some new subject matter that’s slightly more practical or adult-like.”

Brown also shared that,  “I feel like all of these senior courses really go well together and are very applicable to one another.”

COMPASS 

COMPASS is a pathway that consists of so many different kinds of arts disciplines and opportunities that there is no singular capstone class seniors can take part in. 

“Seniors end up within their arts classes and have a larger culminating project that they do within that class,” states Ms. Gardea, COMPASS Pathway Lead and the teacher of many art classes. “They get to, within that class, choose how they are going to represent what they’ve learned in their arts focus.”

This means that a student who is a musician in COMPASS will have a very different culminating experience year than a student who is in fashion.

When asked for an example of a culminating event, Ms. Gardea shared that in March the orchestra had a senior performance night. “It’s like senior night, almost like an open mike, where they get to express themselves through that performance.”

Another example is how, “nearly all of our art shows are a culminating piece.” Students in classes such as AP Studio Art get to showcase and present their work.

All of these pathways give students unique opportunities and the senior capstone that correlates with them allows students to explore their interests while learning good lessons.