"My senior project: I made brownies!!!"

My mom once told me that when my uncle died, one of the last things he said was "You know, I never really tried...."

I thought about this today as I was helping evaluate the senior project presentations.

Every June the school sets aside two days for all seniors to have their projects evaluated by a panle of faculty and community members. Some of the presentations are amazing, most are merely adequate. Some are embarassingly bad.... to the point where I want to shake some of these kids and scream "You had an opportunity to do a project that involved getting into something...anything.... so long as it was your passion... and you couldn't even manage the bare-fucking-minimum!?"

I keep thinking about grad school, and how many people dropped out because they couldn't hack the thesis project. A lot of people think the mediocrity will get them through (and a disturbing amount think that they will triumph through it.)

There's a girl I know who should come and talk to our juniors. Her name is Samantha Larson, and I don't mind using her real name because she's just made herself internationally famous. I know her because she's a musician, a fine oboist. But it wasn't her musical skills that got her in the news. Sam graduated from Long Becah Poly H.S. in 2006 and decided to take a year off before college so that she could train to climb Mt. Everest. She completed that goal just last month. The fact that she climbed Everest puts her in a pretty small percentage of the world population. That alone kicks the crap out of amost anything our seniors could have come up with. But see, it's not just Everest... As of May 17th she's the youngest person in the world to climb the Seven Summits.

Sam crossed my mind today as some kid was trying to explain the personal growth he experienced from the process of assembling his own computer.

I don't mean to be overly critical... I really have seen some fine projects come through... projects that the kids should be proud of. And I know that the Sam Larsons of the world are truly rare. But even if it's not within all or even most of us to be uniquely phenomenal... you would think that more people would aspire, at least, to not suck.