"So what?" Explaining why your reader should care

Use the guiding questions to help you develop the content. Each competency and writing topic includes guiding questions to help you brainstorm ideas. Your essay doesn't have to address every question, but the questions will prompt you to reflect on your experience from different perspectives and learn something new from the experience.

Write for the ePortfolio reader, not the capstone client. Be careful not to alienate readers outside the scope of your capstone audience by using terms they may not know or by assuming they fully understand the depth or significance of the problem your capstone project addresses.

Focus the reflection on the takeaways, the so what? Beyond providing a brief summary of the capstone project (one that defines the problem, client, solution, recommendations, and deliverables), your reflection should focus on what you learned from completing the project (the takeways or the exposition), not on what your group did (the narrative). Hint: the narrative isn't the point; it merely supports the exposition.

Clearly articulate the "bigger problem" the project addresses. While the capstone project prompted your group to solve a specific problem posed by the client, what is the larger issue the project addresses? Why is it important and who cares (for example., who are the stakeholders affected by your work and why do they care)?

Use umbrella statements to state the main points presented in the essay. For example, if the point is to communicate how your team overcame the challenges of completing the work on a short timeframe and with a limited budget budget to solve a problem, an umbrella statement might go like this: "My capstone project was tasked to solve the problem of .... with limited resources of.... and a deadline of .... By identifying specific tasks and creating interim deadlines for each, we created a "roadmap" for completing the work, which helped us to .... My role was to ...., which facilitated the tasks of ….and …." Then explain what each of these points mean.

Provide details to support your claims. Anyone can claim she knows how to plan a project and manage a budget, but what evidence supports these claims? What did you do to move things along? What stumbling blocks did you encounter? How did you overcome them? For example, including a copy of your management plan would be further evidence of your managerial expertise.