text: By allowing projects to be student-designed, schools allow students to develop a sense of self-reliance. This is because the students have to conduct their own research in order to find a topic that interests them, rather than just receive a topic from the teacher. For example, in elementary school, students come up with their own experiments to test, after which they present their findings at the science fair. By doing so, students learn how to depend on themselves to find information. Similarly, sophomores at the Generic_School take a research class. They work on a wide variety of projects that are mostly assigned by teachers, but towards the end of the year, they must come up with an independent research project that they will work on in their junior year. In order to choose their project, students have to conduct extensive research to understand the topic, as their project cannot have been done before. Additionally, they have to continue conducting research in junior year to allow for a wider understanding of the topic. This allows the students to be self-reliant, as they know more about their project than their teacher, who acts as a mentor. Self-reliance is a very important skill that helps people succeed in the community and workplace when they become an adult, so it is important to establish the skill early on.