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Working towards our mission to teach students to become life-long learners, the Magnet Program seeks to develop in students the essential skills and traits of successful, independent scholars.
It enriches and broadens the core academic program along two important paths. The first path is through faculty-led seminar courses, which offer students the chance to explore a variety of interests in great detail, extending and supplementing the understanding and knowledge obtained through the core curriculum. In this stage, students are investigating what interests them in search of their passions.
The second path offers students the chance to excel, by focusing in depth on a limited area of study in an independent project that goes well beyond the possibilities in any core curriculum. Study in the Magnet Program will emphasize the development of each student’s intellectual understanding and individual skills. Each Magnet study will focus in the end on student creation, usually through writing, performing, or researching.
Sharing the project through oral presentation and performance is a central component of the Magnet Program. Each semester of study culminates in a student presentation, which marks the formal sharing of the project and is an essential element of a successfully completed individual magnet project. Many independent Magnet students share their projects in further ways, such as submitting them at exhibition fairs or for publication in an external forum, but the in-school presentation remains a requirement for the program. Students in seminar courses give presentations in their seminar groups as well, building skills toward independent project-level presentations in future years.