To say that my Capstone project was a struggle is quite an understatement. During my time in the class, I switched my topic several times, I struggled with research, and I did my best to stay on top of everything while I had time with for the rest of my life. However, for the hard struggles, I am very proud of what I ended up accomplishing. The capstone project is supposed to be the culminating activity in the English curriculum, and I feel like I was able to use a lot of the skills that I have learned so far in my time as an English major. Despite all of the hardships that I faced on my road to my final product, I was able to use my critical thinking, analyzing, and research skills to produce a final paper that I am proud of.

The story of my Capstone lies in my failed ideas. At first, I really wanted to do something on the Beat generation because I loved the class that COL Ball had done on it, and I was fascinated with the men and women involved in that movement. I decided to look at the African-American members of the Beat generation because they are not usually talked about. However, as I did research on them, I found that there was almost nothing written on them, and I had no way of finding new knowledge on these men. So I had to switch again, and I chose slam poetry because I love poetry and performance, so slam makes perfect sense. I wanted to look at how poets from three races – African-American, Hispanic, and Caucasian – used slam poetry to look at race and masculinity in the 21^st century. After a lot of work, I was told to focus it more, because what I had produced was far too broad. So I cut down on the number of poems I was looking at, and I only focused on race because a lot of poems were on race, but very few were on masculinity. Throughout these changes, I had to use my critical thinking because I knew I had to find a good balance between my passions, and what I needed to do to get a good grade. Overall, I’m very happy with the end result and the subject that I chose because I was able to produce a 17 page paper on a subject that I love, but it is still very manageable to read and understand.

Since I was doing my capstone on poetry, I knew that I had to do some sort of close reading on a number of poems. However, when I was working on my first iteration of my poetry paper, I was unable to really focus on close readings because I had way too much other work to do. When I decided to focus on just three poems and write my entire poem around those three poems, the close readings became a lot more real and easy to do. I was honestly afraid of doing close readings because I knew I had to turn the paper into MAJ Brown, who focuses a lot on poetry, but I knew I loved the topic. When I sent in my first draft of a close reading, I was so pleased to receive largely positive feedback from MAJ Brown. To me, this was the ultimate test, to really dive into these poems and hope that I was able to find something good in the performance. Perhaps my biggest breakthrough was transcribing the poems that I was using. All of my poems were found on YouTube, so I was listening to the poem countless times in order to find anything important out. When I wrote down all of the poems, I was able to make the transition much faster, and I found out more important things like alliteration and allusions because I was able to see how the poem developed. I’m very thankful that I was in classes like Rhetorical Traditions with COL McDonald and Ways of Reading with MAJ Knepper because I was able to use a lot of the techniques that I had used in their classes in order to read the poems more thoroughly.

Finally, research was very tough for my capstone project. While there is good information out in the world on poetry and the race behind it, very little of it was on the modern day.  During my first attempt on my slam poetry paper, I had to go through a bunch of different search engines to find data to support all of my ideas and assumptions. In full, I think that I used twelve papers from four disciplines on my first draft. One can imagine the pain of being told that I had done too much work. It was funny, because a lot of my second paper was based on personal readings and not on social and/or political implications, my paper did not need much research as all. Although I was able to use all five of my original papers, there are no quotes in the paper because the entire paper consists of the close readings, However, I am very glad I was able to do all of that research because it made the close readings a lot easier because I knew where their ideas were coming from. I never thought that I would ever do that much research, but I was surprised at how easy it was. I think that my ability to do that amount of research is such a great testament to how much I have learned from the English department because I used to be awful at research and hate it, but it was fun and easy for the capstone.

The capstone was a trial by fire, to put it lightly. Overall, I’m glad that I was able to be successful in the course, and that I was able to produce a paper that I am happy with. I am glad for it to be over though, because it was a real struggle at times. However, using the things that I had learned throughout my time as an English major, I allowed myself to have fun with my subject, and still was able to produce a solid paper.