Senior Projects Challenge

Ross School seniors face what many of them consider a daunting but exciting responsibility: the senior project, on a subject of their own choosing. More than just an essay or a scientific study or an art portfolio, it begins late in the junior year and encompasses the entire senior year, and at the end of it, they’ve become completely immersed in their chosen field.

Yanni Giannakopoulos and Malik Basnight, for example, have each embarked on an elaborate woodworking project, hoping to build something meaningful that will yield not just a good grade but also a sense of accomplishment and something tangible that embodies their own personalities. Yanni is crafting a handmade replica of one of the world’s most expensive and sought-after guitars, an original 1959 Les Paul Gibson, while Malik is making four artistic chairs that represent issues and struggles in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community.

Malik’s chairs are no ordinary dining set. One is being intentionally distressed, to represent coming out. Another, composed of two chairs that have been taken apart and reassembled back-to-back as a kind of seesaw, stands for marriage equality. A third will represent dressing in drag, with a back resembling a corseted waistline and legs that end in the shape of stiletto heels. And the fourth, which will stand seven feet tall and be painted black, will be a memorial to the victims of AIDS.

“I wanted to do something that I could relate with,” said Malik, who identifies within the L.G.B.T. community. “I enjoy woodworking, so I definitely needed to do that. That way I have a personal connection to it. I’m not artificially making something . . . I have a personal drive to do it.”

Yanni’s project was inspired by a guitar given to him for Christmas many years ago by the rock musician Lenny Kravitz, a family friend. He has been playing it since he was 9 years old, mostly self-taught before arriving at Ross, and plans to study jazz music in college. He grew up in the Bahamas, where access to music lessons in genres other than calypso is limited, he said.

“He got me that and the game changed,” Yanni said. “That’s all I wanted to do. I played eight hours a day, every day.”

He has done an in-depth study of the original 1959 Les Paul Gibson guitar, “which sells for $250,000 to $1.2 million, depending on which famous owner had it. I had the poster of that guitar on my closet door. I thought, ‘There’s no way I’m going to get one unless I become super, super rich one day.’” So he decided to build one himself.

Yanni and Malik, who are roommates as well as friends, are helping each other with their work in the Ross School wood shop, under the careful watch of Jon Mulhern, a visual arts teacher who is mentoring them.

“Yanni’s project is extremely ambitious,” Malik said. “He uses any and all of his time to work. When he isn’t working on his project, he’s thinking about the next steps he has to do.”

Yanni called Malik’s project “beautiful, and an amazing experience.”

“He is finding his voice and using it to support others in the L.G.B.T. community,” he said.

Next week two Ross seniors will present their projects in a series of events called Readings Night, Film Night, Exhibition Night, and Performance Night. Exhibition Night, next Thursday, is open to the public, and Malik and Yanni’s projects aren’t the only two that will be on display. Shanshan He will present an interactive website and a series of oil paintings based on the nudibranch, a soft-bodied mollusk that lives in the waters off Mozambique, where she completed a marine biology internship and studied sustainability this past summer. Sara Stewart will present her life-size model of the human heart, created using a three-dimensional printer and actual medical imaging data. And all the other seniors — there 80 in the graduating class of 2016, the largest in Ross history — will have theirs on display, too.

“Seniors have been working extremely hard this year, and are now putting the finishing touches on their products, which are shaping up to be incredibly innovative,” said Dale Scott, Ross’s senior-project coordinator. “The high levels of the senior project products always amaze me with their depth, commitment, and sophistication.”