IN THE CLASSROOM:

Esteban Sotelo, headphones on, shoulders gyrating, is spinning, scratching and pumping out the music.

His audience remains seated. It isn’t that they aren’t enjoying the show, but there isn’t a lot of room to dance in the small Estancia High School classroom as they sit at their desks, taking notes on Sotelo’s work.

Five teachers, parents and community members judged Sotelo for his senior project last week. The graduating senior shadowed a professional disc jockey for his project and displayed some of the skills he learned for his hands-on activity during his senior project presentation.

Senior projects are a requirement for seniors in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, but Estancia has been asking seniors to do the projects for nine years, prior to it being mandatory.

This year the school had about 230 students present their senior projects about two weeks before graduation.

Marian Dickey, an English teacher at Estancia, helped organize the presentations. She said they try to prepare the students for future careers by having them dress in business attire, speak for at least eight minutes and use PowerPoint presentations.

“A lot of them do teaching, and it cracks me up,” Dickey said. “Because they will tell a lot of teachers some tricks to teaching they learned.”

Students work on their senior projects for most of the school year. It is broken down into four parts — expedition, essay, experience and expression. The first phase is finding and researching their chosen topic, writing about it, then doing 15 hours of shadowing for experience before the expression portion of the project.

“I enjoyed it,” said Danielle Atwood, 17. “I was able to learn more about what it is like to be a doctor, to see what it takes to be a surgeon.”

Atwood did her project on her own orthoscopic surgery and her sister’s ankle surgery, showing video footage of both surgeries through a small camera used during the procedures.

Her doctor made a DVD of the surgeries for her and she described what went on in each procedure.

Atwood will attend UCI in the fall and plans to go to medical school.

Having students use their senior project as a way to learn about a future career is one of the program’s goals.

“We are letting the kids find their niche,” English teacher John Yeomans said.

KIDS TALK BACK

What was your senior project and why?

“Culinary art, because I like food and wanted to get in depth with it and learn about different cultures.”

“Law enforcement. I just want to help everybody of different ages with the problems they have.”

Brenda Z. Ramirez

17, Costa Mesa

“Comic books. Ever since I was little that has been me, drawing in class.”

Anthony Ariza

18, Costa Mesa

“Social worker. I like helping kids and enjoy being around them”

Jennifer Limon

17, Costa Mesa

DANIEL TEDFORD may be reached at (714) 966-4632 or at [email protected].