Stella Kekalos

For my senior project, I am planning on working on and maintaining a small sailboat. Ever since I was little, the ocean and sailing have been a big part of my family’s life. Through my senior project, I wanted to think about the ways that the ocean has brought me and my family together. My dad’s small, old, sailboat has connected us and is the core of my project. Since the sailboat is older it needs a lot of repair work which my dad and I will do during my project. This work involves cosmetic work on the exterior and additional work inside of the boat. While I do know how to sail, this type of maintenance work is out of my comfort zone and is something that will challenge me since I have never really done it before. 

My project will fulfill all four of the buckets. The experiential and academic aspects of my project are combined and will involve learning from and helping my dad with maintaining the boat. The experience will be led by my dad who has prior experience in working on boats and doing the maintenance work himself; he will be teaching me along the way. I will be fulfilling the creative bucket through different ways of documenting my process. I will use film photography to show the process of the work and show my family’s connection to the ocean, comparing old and new photos. I also will produce watercolor pieces alongside the work I am doing on the boat. For the service aspect of the project, I will be participating in beach clean-ups, taking place both in the city and where the boat is. This is something that my family and I have done a lot before so I plan to continue doing it as it aligns with my main project. 

I will measure the success of my project by how much I have learned in my time spent working on it. I would like to become more knowledgeable about something I love to do, sailing. For the products made during my project, watercolor pieces, and photographs, I would like to produce a series of pieces/timelines that encompasses the project and the work I have done throughout it.