My Capstone Experience

Have you ever had a huge project that was the most important thing in the year? Well, you’ll be reading about a very important project that I’ve done. I’ve picked planes and their effect on humanity because planes are too big of a topic and because I’ve been really interested. I will talk about the research, essay, the script, and the final product. 

 

My research part was a little hard. This was because I had to rephrase everything that I got from the sources. Then I needed to read what I rephrased and write about it. The resource that was probably most important was  https://aviationbenefits.org/economic-growth/, this is because this site helped me write one huge chunk of my script and essay, while other sites did not as much. What was challenging for me was rephasing cause it seemed like articles just couldn’t be rephased because they used very confusing phrases like long-connected carries, or expense account. This was challenging because I would have to search up or ask what these meant and there were tons of these. Also, if I didn’t know what it meant, I couldn’t rephrase it.

 

Writing my essay was much easier than I thought it would be. This is because it turned out that when I rephased my research it sounded exactly like an essay but just with a few more changes. What was enjoyable about writing the essay was that you had a lot of time to do it and it felt so good when you finished. What was challenging was editing my own writing. For some reason since I wrote it, it sounded perfect so while everyone was editing I would wait for people to finish to check mine. It turned out there were a lot more edits for me to do. “My main inquiry question was “How have planes affected humanity?” To answer this question, I decided to research the uses of planes, how planes affect our social lives, our economy, global warming, and how climate change has affected planes.” That was the thesis statement for my essay. The link to my essay is here: My Capstone Essay.

 

I decided to do a TED talk because I felt like the TED talk was stronger than the WeVideo. Also, I chose this because my twin and all my friends were doing this one and the WeVideo in my option was very hard to record because you would have to try and try to get a good final product because either you were talking too fast or slow and would restart or someone ruins it. I realized that my essay sounded weird when you said it out loud so I decided to change it, this took about 3 days. Then we would have to split it up so each slide is 2-10 seconds long. This was hard because I would have to split up sentences that sounded weird. But luckily, it could be 2-15 seconds. After I recorded my script it turned out it was way too long. It started at 1,900 words and I had to take out a lot of the script. After  a  day or two it turned out to be 870 words. Which was like 5 minutes. It felt so good when I finished but I felt like I was behind. The link to my script template is here: Script Template

 

It felt very good to complete my TED Talk. What I enjoyed the most was when I memorized it. This was because it seemed very hard but wasn’t that hard because it turns out that if you wrote something it’s very easy to remember. The part that was challenging was doing it in front of the class. Because even though I memorized it I would stumble, fidget, forget, and make up information based on what I remember. This eventually stopped but at the first and second time this kept happening but at the third I got very close to doing it perfectly but then I couldn’t pronounce a word. The process started by me reading it over and over a total of 5 – 10 times then saying it to myself 3 – 5 times then using the slides. I used slides with and with-out flashcards a total of 5 – 10 times. After this I still continued to do this until CapCon.

 

In conclusion, I’m very happy with my final product.  It took a lot of energy, hard work, and time. If I have another important project I hope it’s like Capstone.