After months of hard work, and a year long class dedicated to their projects, the seniors in the Natural Resources Agricultural Sciences Program finally get the chance to showcase their projects. On May 7th the NRAS held the 1st annual Capstone Project Gallery Walk.

At 6pm in the NHHS Cafe guests began interacting with the seniors in the gallery walk as they shared their student projects. The work highlights projects completed with the support of school, community and industry based mentors. Light refreshments were served.

At 7:30pm an assembly was hosted in the auditorium that recognized all of the students and their accomplishments. The keynote speaker on that night was Mr. George Mayo, Executive Director of the Maryland Education Foundation.

There are three different branches in the AG Program and each were represented at the gallery walk. Natural Resources, Animal Science and Plant Science .Teachers of the Capstone classes were Greg Murrell (magnet coordinator), Laura O’Leary (natural resources strand teacher), Jackie Smith (animal strand teacher), Katie Rae Warner (plant strand teacher). This was the first year of the class and the gala with a total of 35 total students in all 3 strands.

Jordan Borkoski is in the Plant strand of NRAS. Her project consisted of analyzing soil samples to determine what soil profile has the potential to support chelone Galbra growth. Borkoski says the biggest challenge during the process was gathering all the data on time.

“I had competed with my poster so I was mostly nervous over how many people would come and care,” said Borkoski, “it went great and we had a huge turnout.”

Juliane Caughron who is in the Natural Resources strand studied the effect of habitat characteristics on the congregation of juvenile fish species in the Upper Chesapeake Bay for her project. She wasn’t particularly nervous for the Galley Walk because she happy with her final project and was confident in her research. This could be related to the years worth of preparation she put into her poster.

“We worked all year on practicing and perfecting how to write each of the sections. We did a lot of lab write ups and writing practice versions of each of the sections. ie abstract, introduction, methods, results and analysis, conclusions, further implementations,” said Caughron.

Natural Resources teacher Laura O’Leary thinks that the gallery walk on Wednesday night was a complete success.

“Students and their posters looked beautiful and disseminated their research to the public professionally and proudly,” said O’Leary. “(I) loved seeing students move out of their comfort zone to complete the year, the whole difficult process, so proudly and successfully.”

Senior Nicole Sexton analyzed how the use of visual aids affects the amount of interactions at an

exhibit in the national aquarium. Sexton is in the animal strand of the magnet program.

“I am relieved that it is over because it took a lot of hard work to complete this project and it was very stressful at some points but I am so glad I stuck with the magnet program all 4 years and that I had the opportunity to complete my capstone poster,” said Sexton.

“It is weird not having it to work on after it being around for over a year,” said Caughron

Caption: Senior Juliane Caughron speaks with the Superintendent of Harford County Public Schools, Mrs. Canavan. This was during the 1st annual NRAS Capstone Gallery Walk in the NHHS cafeteria.