One week into my senior project experience, I found that finally seeing my plan in action felt self-rewarding. Even after several weeks of prep: pitching, planning, digging, it was rather complicated to translate from google docs into a daily schedule. In my proposals, I didn’t account for all the mishaps that I encountered during the start of my experience, ie. testing positive for covid. This delayed the start of my senior project, which I admit was a little frustrating at first but it just made me more excited to start when I did.

I didn’t have too many expectations coming into this project, except for my main one: to be productive. My project was designed to be a fully independent project, so most of my experience was actually happening within the walls of my own home. There are more pros than cons to working from home, but its biggest con is the easy access to distractions with no “authoritative’ figure presiding. So on top of getting my work done, I also had to figure out how to motivate myself and keep the distractions to a minimum. This was the biggest challenge of my senior project so far, but I do believe that as long as I keep my main goal in mind, motivating myself will become easier in the next 4 weeks.

Now onto the actual project! As expected, the academic portion of my project was the hardest to grasp so far. Reading two of my sources, which were introductory texts to food chemistry and baking fundamentals, it felt like I was revisiting my experience in 9th-grade chemistry. I revisited topics such as density, heat transfer [in the oven], structures, and properties of matter, but there were also new topics and diagrams where I had no idea what was going on. This led to a lot of stopping mid-book and google searching until I felt comfortable enough to go back to reading and researching. I underestimated how much catching up was needed to get a cohesive understanding of what really is going on scientifically, but as soon as I did, I found that it was usually a perfect segway to the rest of my week.

Baking with a purpose other than recreational ones made the hands-on portion more intriguing. Usually, when I make pastries I am not thinking about the little details or their origins, but knowing the science and cultural significance beforehand was a bonus! However, it did add more pressure for the end result to turn out the way I wanted it to. When caramelizing the sugar on top of my creme Brulee, I held the torch more delicately than I needed to, which helped me come to terms with how much of baking is controlled by perfectionism. Though, I am glad I decided to leave the baking to the end of the week, because not only does it mean it is a weekend full of homemade sweets, it also leaves you with more freedom, timing-wise. I don’t have to worry about not finishing every detail on my cake because I am always able to touch it up over the weekend.

Compared to where the bar was before I started my project, the bar has definitely been raised after this week. Assuming there are no more unforeseen circumstances, I am hopeful that I can learn a lot from this experience academically, and also grow professionally, just in time for college.