Capstone Essay

In my time as a UW Bothell student, I feel that the last several years of attending the university was a constructive experience for my own development as a incoming graduate. Being a part of the IAS program has allowed me to make connections and grow as a learner in different fields of study and being able to link my own self with problems that are happening in the real world, traits that are necessary for my major in Community Psychology. Out of all of the assignments and projects that I have undertaken over the past three academic years, I felt that there were eight different artifacts that sums up how I have developed in my education and helped to prepare me for the workforce. My chosen works exemplify not only how I met the four core objectives that the IAS Program taught me, but explain how my knowledge in various academic subjects that I’ve undertaken and centered on various dimensions in human rights along with my prior experience in volunteering, will help me find employment in the near future.

As a creative & critical thinker, I am expected to go outside of my comfort zone and show everyone how I am able to use a vast of different perspectives in my work through analysis, application, interpretation and so forth. One example is for my BIS 225 Social Psychology course, I was required to chose one Hollywood film that related the study of social interactions and how individuals are affected based on what type of interaction they have with each other; then proceed to write a paper on what core themes found in the film affect how people intermingle with one another. For my American History X Paper, I proceeded to do an analysis of the movie in question and dive into the key themes that are based upon the various inequalities seen among the White majority race and the other minority races seen throughout the film. Throughout my work, I directly focus upon the major themes of racism, discrimination and stereotyping that are developed and explored in American History X and how it parallels with real life examples and incidents. I also go into further discussion about the characters in the movie, and how while some of them continue to cling onto their misguided beliefs, others proceed to develop as people and eventually come to understand how that kind of hatred is perpetrated by others and what they can do to break free from that cycle of hate.

I found this artifact as being significant to my academic portfolio since it embodies my own critical thinking on being able to watch a movie and having the capacity to analyze its key themes in regards to difficult subjects such as racism and write about how they are important to the movie’s main message. This artifact also exemplifies my creativity by displaying a core concentration on some of the examples of scenes from the film that hammer home the injustices that are similar to what happens in reality and blurs the line between that and fiction, one example being when I talked about a scene in which a group of skinheads assault a Korean storeowner and his workers out of misguided belief that they stole those jobs from white people. Furthermore, I am able use my critical thinking skills in a way that allows my to talk about media that explored various systems of prejudice, such as sexism, homophobia and especially racism.

In my BIS 221 Gender and Sexuality class, my final assignment was when I had to type up a paper that required me to do a case study on the prominence of LGBT culture in New York City, chronicle its true origins that date back to the 90s and explain how these cultural values continue to remain noticeable even today. Throughout my writing, I am able to analyze and explore key themes that are talked about in the films films Paris Is Burning and Kiki, which dive into detail in regards to the melting pot of LGBT racial minorities and how their neighborhoods of Christopher Street Piers and West Village played a critical role in their quest for equal rights. I also talk about and bring direct focus on how these communities fought to save their homes from the plague of gentrification and ongoing increase of drugs and violent crime. Furthermore, I am able to use my abilities in interpretation and application to argue on how all queer identities and motilities are similar and differing from one another various ways and not completely universal to how people should analyze race, class, gender and sexuality.

What makes this artifact so significant to my portfolio is that it its an example of my critical thinking abilities considering a group of people that I want to focus on for my future career based on Community Psychology. It is also necessary because it focuses upon the IAS objective of critical thinking, which required me to focus upon a specific topic, (LGBT groups) and write a clear argument on how this community is significant in NYC’s culture. Also, I am able to get creative and use various films that we watched in class to intersect their themes with one another so I can argue for a group that is highly undervalued in the world that we live in today.

As a student, one of the most important aspects that I have come to understand is being able to ripen my writing abilities and improve my communication skills by having the ability to use various sources to argue on what I stand for and why. For example, in my BIS 359 Ethics & Society class, I wrote a parenting principles paper that goes into detail on what are the core values that I believe embody what it means to be a parent. In this letter, I address my future offspring based upon the core principles that my own parents have taught me in the past about parenting, along with my own principles I absorbed into my parenting ideology while growing up. I also tell my future kids what principles of parenting I will pass on to them in the near future and how they will be imperative in helping them mature into well-adjusted adults. What makes this artifact significant is that I effectively communicate and argue for the core values on what parents should try to be for their children and show a clear direction on the parent I want to be. This artifact also encompasses an act of community psychology that is based on the microsystem of family and how it connects to the community, along with how I will apply some of these principles when working with troubled youth in my future career.

Another example of my writing & communication abilities developing over time is that for my BIS 349 Personality Psychology class, I constructed an in-depth narrative of my life and argue how the experiences from my past and present shaped me into the person I want to be in the future. In the Author of Myself Narrative, I communicate on how my past memories facilitated my growth as a person through different contexts while explaining the key principles I developed and still live by today. I also further argue on how my college journey and choosing to major in Community Psychology has helped me shaping what path in life I want follow in the future. What makes this artifact significant is that it tells the biography of my own life story and how the influences in my life and the choices I made, along with the people I connected with, helped to mold me into the person I am today and give me clear guidance for my future.

In terms of leadership and collaboration, I feel that the most important aspect of these goals is ensuring that everyone has the equal opportunity to contribute so that we can become better listeners, critical thinkers and build trust upon each other. This is shown during my BIS 226 Foundations of U.S. Social Service class, in which I was involved in a Community Based Learning Research (CBLR) project that required me to volunteer at an organization that’s helping those in need and write a paper reflecting on the experience. In this assignment, I recapped my experience on being involved in the CBLR program, especially when it came to my time volunteering at the Northshore Head Start Preschool Program, sponsored by the Center for Human Services in Bothell. I also go into detail on what type of work I did at my place of volunteering and how it related to my IAS learning goals, especially in collaboration and shared leadership. This artifact is meaningful to my portfolio because it’s a point in my college career where I actually got to volunteer at a community that needed all the help it could get, which relates to my Community Psychology major. Also, my work at Head Start not only gave me the opportunity to empathize with kids that were forgotten by the system and need guidance from people that understood their pain, but I also gained further insight in the types of trials and tribulations I will need to understand in the future if I apply for Social Services.

In my BIS 313 Issues In Media Studies course, I worked in a group to write about the history of Black Lives Matter and how this activist movement was significant in bringing attention to systemic racism against Black People. Direct focus is given to the originations of the movement and how my group argued its importance through lectures, small group discussions and seminars. We also discussed examples that relate to the foundation of Black Lives Matter and incidents that continue to evolve the movement even further, such as the shooting of Michael Brown. What makes this artifact important to my portfolio is that it embraces the IAS goal of Collaboration and Shared Leadership, which involved me learning to cooperate with others to achieve a shared objective.

Furthermore, being a part of the IAS program gave me guidance in my Interdisciplinary Research & Inquiry skills, which requires you to be able to effectively communicate with your audience via the evidence you display and identifying how your sources back the main points made in your work. This is shown in my BIS 445 Reality of Inequalities course, where my final synthesis project involved me giving explicit detail regarding the types of state violence that’s forced against people of minority races, with specific direction on police brutality against African Americans by white police officers. Each piece of evidence in my project came with a supporting picture of its own, a specific quote from other sources that ties into the photo chosen and a paragraph that explains how the quotes chosen relates to each picture, the primary meaning behind the photos chosen and how they are connected to state violence. I also touch on how people have reacted to these unequal actions that plague our society and what can be done to put a stop to it. I consider this artifact as significant because I argue on a key facet that is directly harming our community in a systemic cycle and my writing shows how I want to make a difference in that aspect for the near future. I also feel that this synthesis project fulfilled the IAS objective of Interdisciplinary Research & Inquiry because I worked to gather research to get my main message across and focused upon what could be done to promote diversity.

Another example is for my BIS 283 Introduction to Law & Order class, I completed a final reflection portfolio regarding the work I have done throughout the class and what readings I found to be the most significant to my growth in learning. The assignment involved me elaborating on what readings related to the main goals of the IAS program, such as Interdisciplinary Research & Inquiry. Furthermore, I center on how this class challenged my initial viewpoints, the key themes that were present throughout the course and how it engaged our interdisciplinary inquiry skills. This artifact is significant to my research skills because it was a precursor to taking this class back in the winter and it helped me to prepare for what is to come when presenting my Capstone project in June. It also showcased how my learning developed from taking Introduction To Law & Order.

While my time in university has been a wild ride with plenty of highs and lows, I feel that the skills I have developed from the IAS Program back up my own expectations on what I hope to achieve for the near future. Whether it’s through being able to have different perspectives on information that are already out there, continuing to improve my writing and communication skills through showing and explaining evidence for my work, showing the capacity to collaborate with others and become a leader to better understand people’s strengths and abilities and reflecting on how my gathered research relates to what I argue for, I feel that my shown works not only highlight my core strengths that I will put out there for my future in employment, but explains to my family and friends what I have learned from my time at UW Bothell and how the subjects I have dived into in the past will help me in the long run. And as I look ahead to the future, I have great confidence in my own abilities to make a difference in the field of Community Psychology and strive to bring about change in the face of our world’s problems.