High school project idea · Media & Communication
Preserve a living memory, tradition, place, or experience before time changes what can still be recorded.
Create an ethical oral-history archive that protects context, consent, source integrity, and future usefulness.
Why this project matters
Create an ethical oral-history archive that protects context, consent, source integrity, and future usefulness. This project feels different from a school assignment because the student serves a family, neighborhood, cultural group, school, or community connected to the history, creates something visible, tests it honestly, responds to feedback, and explains the decisions behind the final result.
What you will create
Use these deliverables as milestones for Archive a Story Before It Disappears. Adapt the details to your interests, available time, and real-world opportunities.
Research historical context, narrator authority, informed consent, sensitive material, metadata, preservation, transcription, access levels, and interpretation. Document the needs, constraints, credible sources, and perspectives of a family, neighborhood, cultural group, school, or community connected to the history.
Turn the evidence into a focused plan for the oral history archive and public story, including success criteria, ethical boundaries, scope, and a realistic path to completion.
Create the first complete version of the oral history archive and public story. Include a project scope, historical research, consent process, interview guide, recorded interviews, transcripts, metadata, preserved files, and curated public story.
review descriptions and excerpts with narrators, test archive navigation with future users, and revise permissions or context as needed Record what happened, what failed, what users or reviewers said, and which changes you made.
Publish the final oral history archive and public story with a portfolio-ready case study showing the challenge, evidence, process, revisions, results, limits, and next version.
Make the work stronger
For Archive a Story Before It Disappears, use these checkpoints to protect the quality of the work without turning the project into a performance for admissions.
Skills you can build
College application value
Can demonstrate initiative, curiosity, reflection, and growth through the student’s choices, response to setbacks, work with a family, neighborhood, cultural group, school, or community connected to the history, and development of Oral History, Archival Practice, and Interviewing.
The goal of Archive a Story Before It Disappears is not to manufacture an impressive activity. Do real work, keep evidence of the process, and reflect honestly on what changed.
Related college majors
Use Archive a Story Before It Disappears as a clue, then open a related major guide to compare coursework, career directions, reality checks, and other ways to test the field.
Archive a Story Before It Disappears is an original Compass educational starting point designed around real work, visible evidence, feedback, and reflection. It is not an admissions guarantee.