Capstone Essay

BIS 499: Capstone Essay Instructions / Guidelines

As you approach graduation, we ask you to create a Capstone Portfolio by showcasing and framing the significance of a limited number of artifacts from your full archive of work. This portfolio can include written work and essays; videos of presentations; poems and stories; pictures of art projects or posters; field reports and other documentation of experiential learning – any artifact related to your undergraduate education and your accomplishments as a student. You should feel free to include items produced outside the IAS curriculum. You also may showcase items that you consider flawed if they reveal something important about your development as a learner.

CAPSTONE ESSAY:

As you near the completion of your portfolio, we ask you to write Capstone Essay framing your portfolio and your education more generally. This essay should be approximately 1250-1750 words. What you choose to focus on is up to you. Some students write to their future or past selves (or even to their own children) explaining why their college experience was important to them, and highlighting some key lessons or insights they wish to share. Some write to a graduate school admissions committee highlighting their learning, experience & qualifications, and intellectual capacities. Some write to parents or family members thanking them for their sacrifices, and explaining the value of their education at UWB and beyond. And some students take a more general approach, responding to various versions of the prompt below:

“As you conclude your undergraduate education, what knowledge and abilities have you developed that you can carry forward? How does your portfolio provide evidence that you have the knowledge and abilities you claim?”

Whatever you choose to focus on, the claims in your framing essay must be evidence-based and credible, meaning you should include specific and substantial reference to the artifacts you have chosen to include in your portfolio (they can find in attachment #1). Your capstone course professor will provide additional details about how to assemble a Capstone Portfolio that will speak persuasively to your intended audience(s) about your accomplishments and abilities.

You are welcome to use the IAS learning objectives to structure the essay, but you don’t need to: your Capstone Portfolio is ultimately about you, not about IAS.

Guidelines*

As you will see in our course schedule, BIS 499 builds toward the capstone portfolio through weekly assignments.  By the time you draft your final capstone essay, you will have written extensively about your accomplishments and abilities, and revised that work based on feedback. At this point you should be ready to incorporate relevant sections of these writings into a final capstone essay, along with new material that helps support the overall argument you want to make about your skills, experiences and goals. As you work on your capstone portfolio, please follow the guidelines below.

* Note: this is also the grading rubric I will use for your capstone portfolio!

1. Revision: Wherever you draw on previous mini-portfolios, you are expected to edit, redraft, and refine.  This is not simply a cut-and-paste exercise! Essays that do not meet the highest standard of writing, revision, organization and argument will not receive a high score.

2. Incorporate Instructor Feedback & Suggestions from previous mini-portfolios and draft work (find these in Attachment #1)

3. Individualize your Statement and Know the Story YOU Want to Tell: One problem I sometimes see in early drafts are introductions that essentially re-word the IAS Learning Objectives and then say “that’s what I learned how to do.” Reading through these, it becomes difficult to tell one student from another, or get a clear sense of the unique story each writer wants to tell (see good & bad examples at the end of this handout). 

Use the introduction to frame your work and put it in perspective.  How can you best convey your unique abilities and accomplishments to your intended audience?  Be careful to avoid discussions that sound generic and standardized. This is your moment to distinguish yourself to your readers.

One final tip here: you might find it helpful to visit the webpage for your particular degree and view its Learning Objectives (bottom of page). This may, perhaps, offer some more custom-tailored language and concepts to integrate into your discussion. However, be careful to avoid parroting the degree website.

4. Make a Future-Oriented Portfolio: Keep in mind that portfolios are not just static portraits of the past, but also a kind of “claim” about what you can do now, and what you might accomplish going forward. With this in mind, essays should in some way frame the broader significance and relevance of artifacts, skills, experience and abilities in relation to your goals, aspirations or identity as a citizen/activist/learner/intellectual/professional or whatever. Which specific skills are required for those goals? 

5. Know your Audience! Portfolios should reflect a clear sense of audience. What you choose to highlight and how you talk about your abilities will differ depending on how you want to use this project (eg. Is your audience an admissions committee for grad school? A talent scout in Hollywood? An investment firm in London? Your current boss, who might owe you a raise/promotion? Friends and family? A foundation that awards grants for your kind of work? This could also be multiple audiences). Answers to these questions should inform the style, shape, and rhetoric of your portfolio.

6. Include Artifacts: Attach or include links to the artifacts you cite in the capstone essay. Do not leave it to your readers to go hunting for them! If you wish, you are also welcome to embed video, images, or other visuals within your essay to create a dynamic user-experience for visitors. See examples on the IAS Portfolio website: http://www.uwb.edu/ias/undergraduate/iasdegreeportfolio

7. “DESCRIBE artifact, don’t just gesture toward it.” Students should keep in mind that many readers will not take the time to carefully examine or read through every artifact. An effective essay will create a rich sense of the student’s work (context, motivation, etc) by describing each artifact as if the project were totally unfamiliar to the reader.

8. Make Connections Explicit: The link between a given artifact and a particular learning objective needs to be unambiguous. I sometimes see claims like this: “I completed the attached paper for BIS 361, which shows my abilities in Critical Thinking.” But rather than pointing to specific details in the thesis and explaining how/why those count as critical thinking (or leadership or great writing or whatever), the student merely leaves it to readers to do the work of culling through an attached paper and making those connections themselves. Do not make this mistake.

9. Clean up all pages: Remove instructor comments and your notes about peer feedback from all pages and previous assignments, and fix any remaining issues in your portfolio so this begins to look like a polished final product. (This does not need to be fully completed for the first draft, but MUST be done for the final version of your portfolio at the end of the quarter)

Capstone Essay Introductions: Student Examples

FIND THE RIGHT BALANCE BETWEEN:

Unique voice; Individual priorities/interests Official program goals

Student 1

I discovered Occupational Therapy as a career path after my brother suffered from a hemorrhagic stroke when he was only 19 years old. After the stroke, he experienced hemiplegia on the right side of his body, but watching the physical therapists work with him to regain his strength and learn to walk again I had a deep sense that rehabilitation was a career that I could love and pour my heart into. Through volunteering at Children's Hospital I learned more about Occupational Therapy and the wide variety of specialties that the therapists have and I realized that this was the right match for me. During this time of this career decision, I have also been working toward my degree in Community Psychology at the University of Washington Bothell. This degree will serve me well in the realm of Occupational Therapy because recovery and rehabilitation are all about motivating individuals and encouraging their families to be proud to help them; whether it's their child, spouse, or parent with their steps to recovery. In this essay I will demonstrate the ways in which my degree has helped prepare me for the world of Occupational Therapy on an intellectual level, a social level, a professional level, and on a personal level. I hope to foster these abilities and allow them to grow as I continue in my career. 

A project that deepened my abilities intellectually was through a ten-page research paper that I wrote for a Narrative Psychology class, titled "Metaphor and Stroke Recovery." This paper exemplifies the critical thinking skills I've learned in college but also shows how this project helped me grow empathetically as a person. Many researchers, doctors, and rehabilitation specialists often view strokes through lenses centered around physical recovery and changes in mental cognition. Very rarely do people in the healthcare field examine the stories that are told by those recovering from strokes….

Student 2

“Heidi is a natural teacher…. She has administered assessments, analyzed data, and participated in instructional planning. The job has also called upon her to conference with parents, administrators, and teaching staff. I have only had positive, professional reports from all of these individuals. Heidi has facilitated warm, respectful, working relationships with students struggling with autism, other spectrum disorders, Down’s Syndrome, ADHD, depression, emotional/behavioral disorders, and pervasive developmental disorders. Heidi is well informed as to what teaching entails and has already begun her resume of numerous experiences and strengths. When she has completed her credentials, I am ready to hire her.”

 -Jennifer Morley (Moderate CLC Teacher and Mentor)

 

For the last two years I have worked as a special education paraeducator in the contained learning center at Timbercrest Junior High in the Northshore School District.  I initially took this job hoping that the experience would allow me to decide if I truly had what it takes to be a teacher.  I had worked with kids before, via coaching, YMCA programs and classroom volunteer work, but I wanted to be able to completely absorb myself into a public classroom in order to test both the opportunities and limitations of my decided career.  Looking back after two years in this position, I understand the job to be challenging, frustrating, time-consuming, and some of the most fun I’ve ever had.  

Though my work has provided me with invaluable experience and knowledge, it is the combination of this experience and the education I have received at the University of Washington that has earned me the recommendation and support I will need as I continue to pursue a career in education.  Evidence of this goes back to the specific learning objectives that form the foundation of the Interdisciplinary Arts and Science program from which I am scheduled to graduate.  The coursework and research that I have been exposed to over the last two years has both broken barriers and motivated me in ways I had never expected.  My goal is to prove this to you by offering examples of my growth and abilities through the use of specific documents from my education.  These examples will show evidence in critical thinking, interdisciplinary research, writing and presentation, and collaboration, all of which have dramatically assisted me throughout my work as an educator and coach.

 

Student 3  As a student at the University of Washington Bothell in the IAS program I have taken classes where I created projects, wrote papers, and presented to audiences of classmates and intellectuals. It was within these classes and through these assignments that I was able to learn and grown in more ways than one. My experience in the IAS program has affected me intellectually, socially, professionally, and personally in ways that have made me a better person, student, and professional.

Instructor comment: This introduction is rather generic. By simply repeating language from the prompt or listing elements from the IAS learning objectives, you risk coming across as a standardized product of the system rather than a unique individual with priorities, aspirations, and idiosyncratic talents of your own. What sets you apart from others? What’s the main thing you want your audience to know about YOU (not IAS), and what you can do now? Who is your imagined audience?

            

Student 4

In this essay I plan to reflect on past assignments to show how this program has helped me develop my skills in interdisciplinary research, critical thinking, collaboration and shared leadership, and finally writing and presentation.  These four fundamental skills are transferable into a professional career and will help me be successful in my chosen field. In the following essay, I will discuss five artifacts in my IAS portfolio that best reflect and give evidence to these skills.  

Instructor comment: The introduction should make a concrete claim about YOU. What you have here is simply a reiteration of the rubric and then a list of the IAS categories (the task of the intro is to write about yourself, not the program). You also cite your “chosen field” but don’t actually identify it. Think about how to distinguish yourself from other students and professionals, and above all, be creative!      

Worksheet #1 for Draft of Capstone Portfolio

As you think about and draft your Capstone Portfolio, please consider these three key elements: Audience; Argument; Evidence.

1) Who do you imagine the audience of your portfolio to be? (There can be multiple audiences, of course, though this may make the design and framing of the portfolio more complicated.)

2) What central argument or claim do you want to make about what you have done with your education and what you can now do as a result of it?

3) What artifacts will you use as evidence to make that argument credible to your imagined audience(s) – and how?

Keep in mind: while “official” program language can still play a certain role in your essay, your OWN voice/experience/interests/goals should be given priority.