The personal project is a culminating Middle Years Programme (MYP) project, which aims to develop the student’s personal interest and to show and apply the skills, which are acquired through the MYP’s Approaches to Learning. This project is based on the student’s own interests and talents, resulting in a final product or outcome. The personal project is a year-long affair, which begins in grade 9 and ends in grade 10, with the Personal Project Fair.

The personal project has a principled action, which means the students make choices that extend beyond their MYP learning.

Principled action includes:

• Developing an area of personal interest beyond the normal subjects.
• Sharing new information and understanding with teachers, friends & family.
• Changing the students’ behaviors in response to their learning and realizing they can make a difference through the decisions they make and the things they do.
• The process of reflection in which students reflect regularly and record what they learned and how this has impacted their attitudes, behaviors, questions, actions and decisions.

The 2019-20 Personal Project Fair, held on January 22, showcased a wide range of subjects reflecting our students’ learning skills and personal interests. Common themes this year were a growing concern for the environment, and the urge to address and normalize mental health.

Emiliano Albores conducted “an exploration on self-sabotaging, where it comes from and how to stop it, with the aim of interesting others in this topic which concerns us all, as it mostly comes from the different forms of conditioning we are subjected to during our lives.”

Alejandra Hernández documented her Zero Waste Journey, where she attempted to live trash-free for a whole year in order to become aware of the amount of waste an average human being generates and raise consciousness among her community.

Alexia Tapia shared, “I studied mental health through poetry, to learn to express my feelings through spoken word poetry and normalize speaking about mental health.”

Hyun Ji Kang “explored art and personality with the goal of creating a research-based presentation about personality psychology and art psychology to connect both topics through the perception of art to help others understand what they are.”

Finally, Andrew Mejía spoke about our current role in  capitalism through his project titles the Penny Stock Market for Beginners, as he believes that “it connects to this global context because it relates to sharing limited resources with others and making the best of government resources.”