2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas
Turn inspirations into your passion project.
This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.
- AI/ML
- Animation
- Arts
- Biology
- Biotech
- Business
- Cancer
- Chemistry
- Cognitive
- Computer Science
- Creative Writing
- Dance
- Dentistry
- Economics
- Engineering
- Entomology
- Environmental Science
- Ethics
- Fashion
- Finance
- Game Design
- Healthcare
- History
- Illustration
- Languages
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Math
- Medicine
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Nutrition
- Organizational Leadership
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Photography
- Physics
- Psychiatry
- Psychology
- Public Health
- Quantitative
- Social
- Social Science
- Sports Analytics
- Statistics
- Surgery
Final Notes
If you have a particular dataset in mind, I can help you set up an end-to-end project starting from stages as early as scraping data/dataset construction.
AI/ML
How to learn about fashion
Investigate a solution to help people learn about fashion and how to create looks.
Computer Science, Social Science
The Struggle for Integration in American Professional Sports
The mid-1900s has numerous examples of players breaking "color barriers," but not all sports approached integration in the same way. Analyzing the most popular sports of the time period, including basketball, baseball, and football, this project will conduct a historical analysis of how American professional sports differed in its approach to integration. Which leagues were the slowest to integrate, and how did the leagues' justifications for their actions differ? What forces may have been most significant in causing the leagues to take different approaches?
History, Social Science
2D/3D Registration of Lego Bricks
Registration is the process of aligning two different measurements of the same object. For example, in computer vision, it is often desirable to stitch two photos together to create a panorama, thereby registering one photo with the overlapping portion of the other. 2D/3D registration is when an existing 3D model, like a CAD surface, is aligned with an image of the same object, either simulated or in the real world. This has applications in medical imaging, such as aligning a 2D X-ray image with a 3D CT scan. In this projects, students will curate a dataset for 2D/3D registration of LEGO bricks and train a keypoint detection algorithm to perform the registration. LEGOs are well suited to this task because 3D models and simulated images are readily available. Minimum deliverables include a dataset hosted on Kaggle and an arXiv paper describing it. The maximum deliverables includes a trained registration algorithm and accompanying paper.
Creative Writing, AI/ML
Computer Generated Doodles
In this project, you will write a program to create computer generated art. The project deliverable will be a static webpage displaying your favorite art pieces with a blog describing the process. Together, we will learn about different algorithms to generate 2D images from random walks to using procedural textures like Perlin noise.
Computer Science
Healthy Living Workshop for Teens
Create and conduct a workshop or seminar aimed at educating fellow high school students about the principles of lifestyle medicine and how small changes in daily habits can significantly impact overall health and well-being. The project can be broken down into several components: Research Phase: Study the principles of lifestyle medicine, focusing on topics like nutrition, exercise, stress management, sleep, and social connections. Research scientific studies and articles supporting the positive impact of lifestyle choices on health outcomes. Workshop Development: Develop engaging presentations, interactive activities, and informative handouts tailored to the interests and concerns of teenagers. Incorporate real-life examples, success stories, and practical tips to make the information relatable and actionable. Consider incorporating guest speakers, such as local nutritionists, fitness trainers, or mental health professionals, to enhance the workshop content. Workshop Delivery: Organize the workshop in collaboration with school clubs, health classes, or after-school programs. Conduct interactive sessions where participants can actively participate, ask questions, and share their experiences. Provide resources and references for further reading and exploration.
Healthcare
cooperation and competition
The intertwined nature of cooperation and competition: How these processes can help survival, strengthen belonging, shape our interpersonal relationships, or lead to cross-cultural differences?
Social
Start a podcast
Do you have a podcast idea but are not sure where to start? Let's flesh out your idea and set you in the right direction to go from idea to launch.
Computer Science, Business
Natural Language Processing: Linguistics/CS Project
In this project, students will be focused on learning the necessary linguistic knowledge to create a program of their choice. Some project idea examples include but are not limited to : NLP/ Syntax Tree Generator/Part of Speech Tagger. Goal of the project is for students to obtain linguistic knowledge and display it using technical skills. Advanced students will be able to bootstrap their end project using React.
Computer Science, Linguistics
Costume Design
This project involves developing a costume design concept for theatre or film from initial concept sketches and visual research to technical drawings by hand or in Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop
Fashion, Illustration
Launching a Media Brand
Building a media brand is a great way to garner visibility around your ideas an passions. Creating podcasts, blogs, and videos is a fun and fulfilling way to dig deeper into your interests, gives structure to learning in a creative way, and builds a portfolio to easily communicate your passion with others (including future employers and university admissions). For this project, we'll begin by studying some excellent examples of educational digital media and discussing how and why they are successful. From there, you will build a proposal for a media project and actually launch on at least one platform.
Business, Organizational Leadership
Peptide Mimics Drug Design
While much attention is focused on small molecule drug design, peptide mimics can promise much more impact. Not only can they be highly specific, they are also much more resistant to the body's natural degradation systems, allowing for low doses and fewer rounds of treatment. However, there is a lack of computational tools to design for peptide mimics. Using both chemical and biological data, it could be possible to tailor a generative model to offer insights into, or even design, these peptide mimic molecules. This project would greatly expand understanding in both chemistry, biology, and generative modeling.
Biotech, Biology, Chemistry, Math, AI/ML
Culinary health for the community
Create a curriculum on health and nutrition which focuses on quick, healthy and affordable meals for busy family. This would be either distributed on your local elementary school's website for family members or given as a hands on cooking class.
Psychiatry, Nutrition
How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn’t seen since the Civil War. But how, exactly, can this be done? You will learn about what institutions are important for maintaining a democratic society and how “social infrastructure” is helping to solve some of our most pressing societal challenges. You will also learn about network effects, heuristics and biases, and principles of community and belonging. You will research and write a paper on this topic, connecting concepts of social psychology and sociology of physical and digital spaces to propose a theory of how we can preserve democracy amidst the rise of individualism.
Social
Changes in Well-being Awareness and Health Behaviors in the time of a Global Pandemic
This project seeks to explore how the widespread COVID-19 has changed people's perception of both physical and mental well-being, and whether such changes in attitude has led to changes in health-related behaviors in the daily life.
Quantitative
1 - 3 Album Songs
Have a concept for an album in mind but can't seem to put notes to paper? Or, do you have a couple songs but want to find a way to tie them together into a larger concept? These are all great and exciting places to be in, and I would love to help you manifest your visions!
Music, Creative Writing, Illustration
Use a publicly available dataset to understand the relationship between childhood health factors and sleep quality
You will use publicly availalbe sleep study data (for example, the Cleveland Children's Sleep and Health Study) to analyze the relationship between health and sleep. For example, you might focus on how blood pressure is related to sleep characteristics such as the number of times a person wakes up in the night or their total sleep duration per night. Then, you will create graphical figures that showcase your data. After performing this analysis, you will write a paper where you describe how you performed your analysis, what you found, and what it means in the larger context of health and sleep research! This project will give you skills in working with large data sets (including some programming in Excel or R to help you manage the data) and an understanding of how researchers organize and code data. You'll also learn about the biological and neurological basics of how sleep works, how sleep is related to other health characteristics, and how people perform studies to try to learn more about these topics!
Neuroscience, Psychology
Health Psychology - Coping with Stress
What is psychological stress? How do people deal with stress, especially in the midst of a pandemic such as COVID-19? This project would focus on gathering information and data to write a research paper/review on stress levels, coping strategies, and the psychological (and physiological) implications of stress. Stress can be defined as acute and chronic, each of which acts on our bodies and minds in different ways. Furthermore, not all stress is "bad" stress. In fact, a hot part of this research is focused on resiliency in the face of stress. How people respond given their previous experiences and psychological state has been extensively studied, but is always worth an updated exploration and review!
Biology, Neuroscience
A Sonic Narrative of Your Choosing
In this project, you will design a short narrative that is delivered 100% through sound. You will learn how to make sound effects, music, soundscapes, and voice-over. I will help you combine these elements into a powerful narrative of your own choosing. The deliverable will be a bounced WAV file ranging anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes, which will hold a sonic story that you will be proud of!
Music
Open Questions about the New Drug Ozempic
Drugs like Ozempic are great examples of how basic science research can impact patient care! This drug, used to treat diabetes and obesity, has quickly become widely poplar among patients and news outlets alike. However, there is still a lot we don't know about precisely how Ozempic is working and what the long-term outcomes of chronic use might be. Imagine you're a doctor with a patient who has questions about the drug. How would you go about gathering information to answer their question? We can use this project as a chance to explore what it might be like to delve into recent research, summarize published outcomes, and list open questions. Together, we would explore how to best search for relevant articles (using resources like PubMed and UpToDate), how to digest both medical and basic research papers, and how to write a scientific report detailing your findings. By honing these skills to answer the above research question (or another one you find interesting!) you'll get exposure to what many doctors and scientists do every day as they work to understand new developments in the field.
Healthcare
