The culmination of the COA course of study is a senior project. Students usually undertake this final project during the term before commencement, though it can be done at any time during the senior year. Final projects are typically one-term projects which earn three credits, though some students spend more than one term working on their project, combining it with classwork.

Final projects are as individual as the students who create them. To see more projects, visit the Thorndike Library where one copy of each senior project is archived. 

For her senior project, artist and naturalist Sarah Drummond '05 sought to convey the full richness of a summer of bird life on COA's island research station, Great Duck Island. From a summer's worth of observation, scientific research and sketches, she mounted a multimedia exhibit within College of the Atlantic's George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History, "Parallel Worlds: Four Seabirds of Great Duck Island."

Eamonn Hutton '05 reconstructed Turrets Sea Side Garden, a 4,000-square-foot garden that, he recalls, "was so high with weeds the view to the ocean was blocked," when he first saw it. After working for more than a year, making landscaping and soil enhancement plans for the hundred-year-old garden, by August, 2005, the garden blossomed with pink roses and purple astilbe, becoming a place for the public to gather.

Aaron Lewis '05 recorded the ambient Sounds of Mount Desert Island - a pond in Acadia National Park, the chatter of tourists in downtown Bar Harbor, the crash of a thunderstorm on his own porch, the banging of plates in the kitchen of the park's famous restaurant, the Jordan Pond House. An edited four-cd collection became an aural exhibit at the college's George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History which Aaron later edited further to create a CD, The Sounds of Mount Desert Island, a commercially available cd.

Adam Nordell '05 is committed to two things: oral history and giving back to the people whose stories he has recorded. He conducted his senior project in Guatemala, where he recorded the stories of a group of former Guatemalan refugees who had been resettled from the highlands to the Peten rainforest after the Guatemalan civil war. While there, he also vowed to improve the health of women and children by bringing better stoves to the community, a task he accomplished before the year was out. 

Dustin Eirdosh '04  created a sustainable agriculture project at the local high school which he called Community Seeds. The project involved working with students to grow food that they might consume in the school cafeteria. The first year after Dustin graduated, he continued the project under a community grant. The second year, the school decided to fund a position for him to continue his work. He is now writing a school curriculum based on his project.  
 

Sam Wustner '04  mounted an art exhibit of oil paintings in the college's Blum Gallery. In his show, In and Out of Focus Sam displayed the result of three months spent focused on painting the human figure, drawing and painting fellow students.  
 
 

Jennifer Warnow '04 created a lesson plan, Beyond Kinematics: The Beginnings of an Interdisciplinary Physics Curriculum with the intention of bringing the joy back to studying physics, using questions of history and sports to reveal basic concepts. 
 
 
 

Michelle Dumont '02 wrote a curriculum for an advanced high school social studies elective, Get Up, Stand Up. This curriculum is designed to use human rights as a vehicle to study international law, geography, history, politics, economics and culture. 
 
 
 

Anselm Bradford '02 created a multimedia kiosk examining the use of plants in the nation of Vanuatu, an island in the south Pacific, and their value for industrial, food, and artistic purposes. His project, Vanuatu and the Role of Plants is also an interactive website.