 Hi guys. So I'm Karen Miller. I'm the DEO which means the deputy executive officer for the malls program and this is our panel on the capstone. Hi this is a panel on the capstone. Oh hi Mithl. How are you? Good to see you. How's everything going? Oh perfect we're just about to start. Wow great timing. So I'm just gonna spend like two seconds explaining what a capstone is but then we're gonna hear more from our speakers about about what their capstones were and I think it will be really useful to hear from because they have a range of projects that they were all engaging. So you have two options in the malls program and I think in all of the master's programs. Is everyone here in malls? Okay so which is a thesis which is a 50 to 60 page paper or a capstone. A capstone is a project that you do and it could really take almost any form. A lot of people that we have do capstones do something digital because of the digital technology the digital humanities stuff that's really I think quite well supported here at the Graduate Center. Although some people make movies or did you do a writing project. So we'll hear about that. And then you write a 20 page white paper along with your capstone. So the capstone is some kind of significant project where you will do significant research but it's it's really something that you would define with your own advisor. So we can't tell you what the capstone is because it really is it really could be many many things. Is it usually a digital project or a multimedia project or it could be something it can be something completely play yeah it can be a play it can be a performance piece it can be it we started the capstone I think like maybe four years ago does that sound right to you. As an option for folks who didn't feel like the thesis was a great fit for them and also because our digital humanities stuff was getting bigger and to accommodate the interests of folks who wanted to do digital projects. So I'm going to introduce everybody and then I'm going to just ask a series of questions and then we'll hear from everybody about the experiences that they had and and then we'll just have a conversation and it's kind of nice with there. So a few of us will just have a pretty casual conversation. So Roxanne Shirazi is over here. She is the dissertation research librarian here at the meaner Reese library. Answers at the Lee as the liaison librarian for sociology theater film studies and the school of labor and urban studies. She holds an MLIS degree from Pratt Institute and an MA from CUNY Grad Center. Her research focuses on digital scholarship academic labor and librarianship as a feminized profession and Megan what's your last name? Addison. Addison sorry recently completed her master's in liberal studies combining the gender and sexuality track with the memoir and autobiography studies in a program self-titled femme narratives and the psychology of self. I love it. Well at the grad school at the grad center, hi, she focused her studies on the on the likes of Britney Spears alleged breakdown epigenetics and transgenerational trauma as well as Winnicott's notion of the teddy bear when she's not writing about her tumultuous relationship with her mother she's congratulating herself on a recent ability to successfully enjoy tofu. Megan Wu is a 2017 malls alum. Her research interests include Asian American studies, pedagogy and life-writing. Her capstone is called a girl among ghosts an experimental project. It's a life writing piece about her growing up in up Asian American. She's currently an adjunct faculty member at Queensborough Community College and a coordinator of HR at Success Academy Charter Schools. So thank you for coming. So I'm just gonna ask some questions and you guys can respond and then so how did you pick your topic? Why don't we just go down? Yeah I mean I think me kind of coming into the malls program my interest kind of evolved over the course. First it was like Asian American studies and sort of specifically Asian American women writers and I'm really into Maxine Hong Kingston who my my right I guess first contact with her was her memoir Woman Warrior and I was going to do something with that okay writing about sort of her narrative how it relates to her growing up Asian American and like the steam around ghosts and everything was just kind of all over the place I would just call it and then one day I kind of sat in with my advisor and I was telling her about all these things and why I chose this project I want to work on she goes it seems like you're talking about yourself. So she's like why don't you just write about yourself and then from there kind of connected dots a little bit and see how you your writing is and what is the relationship there with Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir and so there goes that capstone. Oh that's so great I love that story. Okay so I sort of picked my topic by I guess I will talk about my process a little bit by answering this question because I wanted to look at every paper that I wrote throughout my mall program and to see what were the running themes that I was clearly exploring because I knew that I was I come from a psychoanalytic background so I knew that there was sort of these ideas that I was grappling with but I wasn't quite sure what they were and so I reread everything that I wrote to try and see okay what are the like recurring themes that keep popping up over and over again so that I can sort of ring and reintegrate them into some sort of cohesive whole. So that was how I just sort of like went through pulled I had an outline of like bullet points and paragraphs and things that stuck out to me I put it all together in a piece of paper and I thought like what am I trying to say through this piece and then that was how I chose my topic from there. So I was actually doing a thesis I took a very long time so the capstone didn't exist when I started but I was in the digital humanities track and the American Studies track and I started the program right after completing a library degree and in library school I really wanted to tackle the subject matter a little more and library school were so concerned with kind of like the mechanics of all of it and I wanted more content in that sense more of the subject content so even though I came here and did a lot of digital humanities which seemed to overlap with a lot of library stuff I was really like determined to get something that wasn't so library oriented right even though that's not the easiest way to complete the degree it would have made more sense for me to just use some of my library work to build on and make something and so I spent a long time just trying to figure out like what what topic I wanted to explore and I came across a something I had had already with my family history knowing that my mother had this collection of letters and I wanted to do like a digital history project and figure out how to take archival materials even though it sounds like a library project now take archival materials and turn it into a digital project and go through the process of of turning letters into something that was more machine readable and just understanding what that process is more so I had a collection of letters in my family history and I thought okay maybe that'll work and that's how I came across it so it sounds like all did did all of you start with the thesis first I guess yeah did you also start thinking about writing a thesis before you decided to turn to the capstone yeah so then what what made you turn to the capstone like it sounds like for you it was a conversation with your advisor but why did that feel like the right fit for you right because I guess for me the thesis was and I don't know if it's the right terminology but more academic you kind of writing for me and I could have you know just went in and wrote like a life writing piece and turned into a thesis right but the point of it was really for me to kind of experiment narrative writing on the one hand but then on the other hand kind of connected back to theory and also like Maxine Hong Kingston's own writing so I was kind of like well how do I really kind of go in and out in between the two so it was more like the project aspect was my writing and then the reflection piece was kind of me combining like my approach and my methodology and by the reflection piece do me that white paper yes the white people and how long was your how long was your capstone in terms of time frame or the like the how many pages was your okay so I mean I think the reflection piece was what 20 the reflection piece right and then my project itself was probably another 40 50 pages yeah so how did you turn to the capstone make that decision I think I had a great time at CUNY at the Graduate Center but I did experience some pushback with professors when I wanted to write experimentally and to incorporate personal narrative into my writing I there is still a very pervasive academic voice and academia that is more objective and so you know I was told you could you could do life writing in the conclusion or the introduction but it I really wanted to do a lot of like genre bending and if people are familiar with the Argonauts or Bluets or anything like that like I wanted to do something in that vein and really I mean and then I you know I emailed the department and said this is what I want to do can I do this and they said do it capstone so I wanted to get permission first to make sure I wasn't gonna do all of this work and then have someone say that's not legitimate like do it again and have to do a whole other semester so I basically just laid out exactly what I wanted to do with my advisor and with the department and they said okay do a capstone and go for it so and how did you find yourself and I think that it was kind of career consideration mm-hmm just that I should have some kind of practical experience in dealing with the digital methodologies given that I was librarian working and learning this stuff so that is even though I really wanted just to write a thesis but then I felt like I should do the thing because I wasn't yeah I didn't know where my career would end up mm-hmm cool okay so how'd you pick your advisor that's an interesting question yeah yeah because I mean I started out do I was on the American Studies track and I already had like a couple of professors I was kind of taking courses with but at the end of the day I mean they told me you know straight out that they would be happy to work with me but things like life writing and memoirs not really what they're used to you know so that was kind of when I went through since I in my undergrad studies right I major in English so I went through sort of the English department and kind of looked up different faculty members who were here and sort of the courses that they taught and what their focus was and that was when I found Nancy Miller my advisor who kind of just fell right into what I was doing and even at that point I wasn't really quite sure about what what it was I want to do it just seem like oh seems like interesting course seems like her research is interesting let's try it out you know and then after taking a semester of her course was post-woman writers that was when I sat down with her site hey you know I do my thesis you know can we maybe sit down and have a conversation and she'd like yeah of course and from there on we kind of like had meetings regularly and she was like okay I'll be your advisor yeah I I definitely had some challenges not not because I mean there's such an amazing faculty here but because I didn't really I took classes in so many different departments I didn't work with one professor in particular over a course of time so I and one of the professors I wanted to work with was on leave but I found I did find a really amazing advisor mark McBeth who's really great and I took a writing course with him and the project that I was working on was what my thesis turned into so I was already working with him this semester before my my final semester when I was doing my capstone because I already had a relationship with him he already knew my project so it just was a really natural fit to progress into continuing work with him rather than him never seen my work and then just sort of jumping in together so so I wanted to do something digital and digital humanities track was still pretty new and so I had taken the introductory class with Matt Gold and Steve Breyer but I found myself wanting to study more digital history which the digital humanities stuff here was more like digital literary studies but Steve Breyer is more from a social history perspective background and so I I think I ended up doing an independent research semester with him as a digital history class because it just didn't exist here there was no digital history course so we kind of made made one up like we had a reading list you know I read a bunch of social history and digital stuff and so after that experience it was like oh now that that's reminding me that's how I came across my topic what could I do that social history that's digital that's you know and so once I figured out the topic and had already kind of worked with him through a semester and he was willing to be the advisor even though he didn't have experience in the actual technology that I was using he didn't know that and there wasn't anyone here who knew it but but we also had a good like working relationship in a way I was stretched pretty thin for time I had like I think when I started I had toddler and like another kid it was like there was a lot going on and he was flexible like he understood that like I wasn't looking for someone who was going to give me a lot of daily like or not daily but a lot of guidance I wasn't looking for I was I wanted someone who was willing to just have me check in every once in a while so it worked we've done that semester how often do you end up meeting when you were writing the capsule I think we mostly we did a couple Skype calls but not off I mean I actually as I said I took some semesters off basically I kind of had to set the project aside for a while so I don't know about that but I found myself not going to the project I started to work more I had other things going on and I had kind of set it aside for a while and then it turned out that I just was up against time to degree and it was like I have to finish it or not finish it yeah and so it was like he was on sabbaticals like can we can we bring this back again I think I'm back so yeah I don't know yeah yeah how often do you guys meet with your advisors we emailed a good deal and Mark was great in that we set up a calendar right at the beginning so he said like I want to know what your deadlines are so I went through the whole semester and I said this is when I want draft one to be done and he knew he's like this is gonna be flexible let's just set deadlines and that was really helpful for me so I had deadline one deadline to deadline three and when not and then I would send him it over email and he would give me feedback within 24 hours so we had pretty nice in communication but we only met in person probably three times I think we met at the end when it was sort of the last stretch and he thought let's just meet together I went up to John Jay and we just busted it out and just like finished it together so that we didn't have to deal with so much back and forth over email we could do a lot of continuous work together which I highly recommend doing that was really helpful I mean I would say I met with Nancy probably monthly because the thing is I took the course with her the semester before my capstone so I think like towards the end of the semester we were kind of already in conversation and I was starting to write a little bit and kind of letting her see my preliminary work and from there we worked on so it was probably what like November December we met and then it was break so we came back in January so end of January I would say maybe end of January early February we met one more time and then that was when she told me okay these are you know possible changes you want to think about or you know concepts that you want to maybe play around with and then we met again I would say in March yeah so it's like month every other month and to turn April yes well yeah so how did you do your research did you use archives or interview people any thoughts or comments about this process did it take longer than you expected I mean I think I give my credit to Nancy okay during my research process there was a lot because for starters Maxine Hong Kingston she's been around she's pretty well-known a lot of people have written about her there's so more writing about her and I was just kind of like oh goodness like you know where should I start and even though I had maybe one or two papers that was around her writing already I was still a little iffy in terms of which direction I should go so Nancy gave me a couple of recommendations and she looked through my list and told me you know I think this might be a good source for you so I yeah I give my credit to Nancy she pointed me in the right direction this is what you got to do and go for it mm-hmm I think I since I did pull from a lot of my papers it was all research I'd been doing since I started in the mouse program which is really helpful I went back and re-looked at all the like like the syllabus for the classes that I took and just sort of looked at even one even classes I took in my undergrad that I like things I'd been thinking about for years I went back and like re-looked at that and then obviously my advisor pointed me in the right direction of things but I think we had such a good rapport that I could push back and say like because your advisor I mean he would always tell me that as a professor you're going to point someone in the direction when they're working on a paper and it's not necessarily the direction that they're going to want to go in so you need to learn as a writer is this advice that I want to take or do I not want to take this and trust my own boys and so he would often suggest things to me and he comes from a very different background than I did and so a lot of times I would say you know I don't think that would be helpful or yes it would be helpful so we had such a good rapport I think that I could I could be honest with him when he would say here's like ten authors you can read and I think I'm not sorry Mark like I'm not gonna read and also I don't necessarily have time but I really wanted to do archival work I wanted to look at Winnicott's archives because they're in New York since he was a huge portion of my thesis but I just didn't have the time unfortunately but I still do work on my project still I still work on it even after I've deposited it and so I'm planning on doing that in the future but yeah research I didn't do interviews because mine was an experimental piece of writing so I wasn't interviewing or doing any of that but I definitely like went through and just looked at everything I'd read previously and obviously did all the traditional methods you all know how to do for research so I took way too long so my let's see my project was a family history kind of project I had letters that my great-grandfather had written to his friend and colleague who they lived in Los Angeles and his colleague was Japanese-American and was sent to an internment camp when World War two start you know Pearl Harbor we all know and they were working together and so they wrote letters back and forth and my great-grandfather kept the letters and kept carbon copies of his own letters so I had this whole dialogue between these two people which was like 500 pages of letters because wow the his colleague never came back to Los Angeles ended up settling in different areas and they kept up a correspondence they were friends and they worked a lot together so I knew about that and that's what I decided to work with and I had to learn more about Japanese-American internment more about Los Angeles history more about you know everything going on in the letters so I spent a lot of time talking with my mom and I ended up contacting the other the Japanese-Americans family we had lost contact with I mean it was a whole I spent a lot of time doing this and you know tended to be kind of emotional which is maybe why I set it aside a lot I think and and then I had to learn the technology that I was trying to use so what I wanted to do was to not just digitize the letters but to try for me the thing was that the letters have a back and forth of topics that one might want to follow so in one letter they would like be like hi how are you where's this person how's this going right and you might get an answer the next letter or maybe it's three letters later that they bring up that topic again right so the idea was to try and encode the letters and get these topical threads running through this whole thing so that if I were just interested in like the family history I could follow that threat or if I were just interested in little Tokyo because they talk a lot about going on what's going on in little Tokyo or if I were just interested in like the doctor's family you know so that I could kind of code those things and follow them through this whole letter did you do all that coding it was so much no I mean when I started this with with professor Brier he was like are you gonna do your PhD on this because this is not a thesis no I'm not I'm gonna try and do so for me it was like scoping the project to try and forget how much I could do I wasn't gonna be the subject expert but I also wasn't trying to approach it just from the library science side so I was trying to learn as much as I could and then just do a handful of letters as a proof of concept right and so I started to learn the technology I started to learn all of the stuff kind of teach yourself so it was a lot it was maybe not the best example of a capstone project I have yeah right here I don't know if it's there it's gone back but I'll pull it up for people later we can continue okay so great challenges okay so some things about your just the process and I have like a bunch of questions and these might not be relevant to you or not but sort of this is about like your process of work so did you do brainstorming a lot do you do a lot of free writing how much do you aim to write in a sitting or to do research in a sitting where did you work did you look at other capstone projects any things that you think are important what kind of advice do you have like what was your process like and then what kind of advice do you have for your colleagues here yeah I mean I think for me in terms of the project itself definitely a lot of free writing and I encourage my students to do free writing a lot of times because I think just from that you get a lot of different ideas and also you kind of really get to especially if you're you know into writing you get to do a lot of self-reflection discover new ideas kind of like think about things that you never even thought about and cut you get really get to learn about yourself a little bit more and also about the people that surround you so in that sense it was really eye-opening for myself and I think similarly while I was writing a lot of emotions kind of surface and I was like whoa what is going on so about the same time I would say that part came freely to me and it was actually something that Nancy encouraged you say don't care so much about structure per se just do the writing first and then afterwards you know we can kind of think about things like chapters or even think about Maxine Hong Kingston's writing style and the way how she structured her book and we can maybe work off of that in terms of the white paper itself I would say I went back to the previous maybe two three other papers I did for my other classes and then figure out what are some things I can pull together and then did additional readings that Nancy recommended so did you did you write the whole capstone first and then do the white paper or was it sort of happening at the same time and I did the project first and then went back to do the white paper yeah just because I think the project itself kind of came to me a little bit easier because one I was writing about myself but two in that process there was like there was no guidelines you know it was like kind of fun I got to do what I wanted I get to most of the time I work at home by my dining table and kind of just wrote you know whatever and didn't really care about things like even grammar and I wrote in a way because at home I speak Cantonese right so there are times in which I'm like oh like how would I say this in English right but that kind of just you know you kind of have to go to your inner voice right and then whatever comes out even if it's grammatically incorrect you kind of ask yourself but this sounds right you know at the end of the day I definitely tend to write and like bursts I'm not someone who writes continuously but I kind of sit down I spent so much time in the library which I'm sure you all do and so that was really helpful to be an environment where I could be I could spend like long hours that was free that like was safe and warm in the winter but I would say like a lot of my writing to be honest was actually more editing and crafting than actual writing because I pretty much took the final paper I wrote and the very first paper I wrote funnily enough and then combined them together and obviously edited and edited and edited and edited and edited over and over and over again so and then sort of like just built in transitions throughout the piece so it was a lot it wasn't necessarily me writing like a 60 page thesis from scratch it was a lot of taking what I'd already done and then making it fit together I'm trying to think of how long was your right was your like 60 pages but it's in fragments so it's not like in paragraph form so it's it's more digestible than it sounds and then I did the yeah I did the white paper and what was actually really helpful for me because I was sort of I didn't really want to do the white paper to be honest I thought I'm doing this long project and then I have to write another paper that justifies why I did this work but it was actually really helpful because it made me think about like why am I doing what am I doing why am I doing what I'm doing like what is the purpose what am I trying to get out of this and I actually went back and I supplemented information from my white paper back into my capstone because I wanted it to be the sort of like hybrid piece where you could weave in and out of both and that it all blended together and this flew in sort of way so that was really helpful actually to write my capstone then write my white paper see how they were related and then see how they could feed into each other because they should they should be ultimately like a project that flows together rather than two independent pieces in my opinion there were a lot of questions but I don't yeah maybe we'll get to the advice later so so maybe talk about your process and then we'll hear a round of advice my process my process most of the writing would happen at night as I said because I have the two little kids and that was just the time when I could focus for an extended period of time I actually as I said I said it aside a few times the challenge that I have found with the digital stuff is that the digital part takes so long to do in a way that writing I always found that if I were like up against the wall okay I could just crank it out you just write something right you get like you're draft out not that it's easy but you have some way to just quickly write because I've been writing for all these years the digital stuff especially doing like any kind of online interface it's like just the clicking and waiting for the thing to reload and you can't like speed through it in the same way so I always underestimated how long it would take you know just having to what oh what's not working you know little delays that would make it take longer so that was frustrating and then I just got very existential and like down about why I was doing it and all of the things I thought I would discover when I started didn't come through and I was feeling torn and the whole beginning of the project was sharing these letters with people who will learn from them and then as I got more comfortable with the letters and more familiar with them and more close to the subjects in the letters I wanted to be like no I can't you know I was somehow wanting to guard the people in the letters and felt somewhat guilty by like displaying you know they got very intimate in a way because there was there was no other way to communicate I the letters were almost like reading a diary at some point because you just learned a lot about what they thought about going you know what was going on in the world they don't always come across flattering like for them you know and it's my family and it's someone else's family and it's just so there were a lots of like oh what have I done what am I doing I don't have any way to finish and so I actually just took that advice that you hear when you hit a writing block to like write through it and so that's what I wrote about I wrote about all of these kind of ethical the challenges I had and how all of a sudden even though I thought I would want to share them how I struggled with that and that's what the content of my writing ended up being the white paper I didn't have a white paper because it didn't exist yet so it was actually a thesis it was like a there's a lot of reflection and writing about this literature review reflection and then there's a process methodologies section talks about the technology yeah but yeah the the conclusions I was to draw from doing the experience I didn't have conclusions and I was stuck going whatever so my conclusion became all of the struggles around grappling with those issues yeah which is which is a common approach in a white paper also like like when this the 20-page thing and people people have really different approaches to the white papers so if you guys do you guys all know how to find the malls theses at the library we will show you on the other tab here great okay I was have to go where I can actually see yeah why don't we do that we'll sort of take a break and we'll show you how to find things on the website and then we can hear some oh where did you get stuck and unstuck I feel like we've been talking about that a little bit maybe we can hear some something about challenges and advice and then this is the list of all the these projects yeah so everything gets into the library's digital repository which is called CUNY academic works it's run by CUNY's office of library services it's our little space on the internet where these things live and so there's a collection here that's liberal studies master's theses and capstones and you can jump by gear and view them that way so there's Megan right there some of them are available to read immediately and some have an access embargo so they're not available online yet so that can go anywhere from six months to two years and it's renewable so some people think yours is available I don't know if you decided to make yours available yes yeah yeah yeah mine's up there too I mean but you can't tell until you click on it to see whether you can read it but if you're here you can actually also get if it's embargoed you can access it through interlibrary alone so my next question is where did you get stuck and where did you get unstuck? I would say there were like I've mentioned before there were moments in which things kind of got emotional for me just because I started writing about my aunt and then I started writing about my mother and I didn't intend to write about my mother and again I think going back to Roxanne's point right you are really writing about sort of people like real life people and sometimes you're not sure whether or not you want certain information to be there and you go oh like what happens if my aunt found out about this right or does my mother really want this to be out there things like that and you kind of to figure out well how do you portray your character so to speak right in a good light in a bad light I mean and then you kind of kind of struggle with you know your own feelings too because you know these things happen to you right in your real life and so there are moments like that where I just had to kind of stop writing and like just walk around walk a bit and like come back into a fresh setting and kind of go back into it and be like you know it's not a big deal I just think of it like that right it's just a capstone and then be like just have fun with it and kind of just write as it is and I think when the editing part came that was when I really had to decide like okay what sort of things am I going to take out so that for sure nobody would get to read it but for the most part I would say I kept a lot of stuff there yeah I would say I got stuck more so in the beginning because it was really hard to find the scope of the project and to know exactly what I wanted to focus on I'm probably skipping ahead in terms of words of advice but be as specific and focus as possible probably right at the beginning is what I would recommend to myself if I had to go back because you think you have a lot of time and you have all these really great ideas and you want to do this like really amazing great project and then you know I'm sure most of you work full-time you have lives you have mental health you have everything that life throws at you and so I got stuck in figuring out like what do I want to write on like which is probably maybe for some the easiest part some people know they're like this is what I'm doing my thesis on this is what I came here to do that was where I got stuck was like what do I want to write on what do I want this to look like and I think like I had such a specific idea in my head of what I wanted the project to be but I had I was stuck in knowing how to execute that and I think I really had to I saw Marie Howe talk recently and she was hanging about Michael Cunningham and she said when he was writing the hours he basically had to let go of the book he wanted to write and accept the book that it ended up being and I feel like that's what I had to do I had to let go of the project I wanted to do and that was in my head and just accept what's going to come is going to be a different project and that's okay and that's when I got unstuck when I thought like just let it go let the idea in your head go because it's not gonna exist like that in reality right and as I spoke about writing writing through it but I think that pushing saying it's not everything again this is at the end of the day it's a degree requirement and it can be something else afterwards so I really when once it came down to okay I have to finish this thing what am I gonna do then it was really just getting the pieces to have it you know good enough done you know that that became the priority even though it's not done in my brain it's yeah you know the piece the iteration of it there is done the version that it was for my degree yeah so maybe we can hear some advice and then we can get some questions do you guys have advice that you want to give yeah I mean I think just have fun with it I think that's the best advice honestly because I think sometimes especially when we're working on these projects whether it be thesis capstone term paper whatnot you have a lot of expectations for yourself and also for the project and you know you feel like you're working with an advisor so you have to kind of report back to them as well I think at the end of the day just kind of let things go a little bit not to say wait till last minute okay but you know just have fun with it and see what is the end product and kind of like you know Megan and Roxanne you mentioned right I think in the project itself might be over but you can always go back to it right afterwards so yeah I think I've kind of already said in my last point like allow yourself the liberty to let go of the idea you have in your head and what if the project will become the very practical point of starting early start as early as you can I definitely I wouldn't say I waited too long but if I could I would start earlier on how long did it take you I mean ultimately two semesters I mean because I was working on it for half a semester and then I spent a whole semester just doing my capstone so a semester and a half and it wasn't like I was working continuously that whole time but definitely it took me that whole time and I'm still like I said I'm still working on it and I think like build a relationship with with professors early on so you're not picking someone willing nearly I mean I really loved who I worked with and he was really great but definitely like think early do research on professors because even if you don't take a class with them doesn't mean you can't use them for your advisor so kind of do research and see who aligns with the work you want to do and build a rapport with them so that once you do your thesis is a little bit more of a natural relationship than maybe someone you don't know super well yeah those are all good advice for me scoping the project and thinking of it as a semester of work even even if it's the culminating semester and it's building on the rest of your time here the amount of time that it should take and also talking with the advisor when it did finally decide to finish it and I knew that I was working towards that I mean I contacted him again and said okay here's the department deadline here's the library deadline I'm gonna try and get a draft here you talked about doing that as well setting out the timeline like a couple of months ahead at least because they might be on sabbatical or dissertation committees or this and that you know and and just being an open like when you need their feedback by I think worked out do you guys have questions or is there something that you learned that you thought was useful or what are you guys thinking of doing I still don't have I'd like to have a better idea of each of your projects so I mean your your project you used some sort of software to create hyperlinks so that people sort of yeah and that's it's there I mean if you want to know more about capstones I could talk about some of the other kinds of capstones I've seen just specifically each of your projects and what will what it and and and do they have a future right beyond being just a capstone project online on the CUNY website oh okay so well this is an example of one of the letters it's not fully on the so this is my challenge because it wasn't actually just using a software or using I mean this there's not much to see it's just type I call I called it the Holly Suski letters so that was a collection of letters that they were mostly type script and so it's just encoding them using the specific language called the TEI it's in XML and so you're like wrapping each line with these tags it's a lot like HTML except that then it's also identifying when it's a person when it's a topic when it's an address when it's a this right so on this one I think you can see a little bit I had to make decisions like what to do when they would write kanji you know that I I could try to find somebody who could say what that was or how do I encode that and instead because I had to finish this thing and figure it out there's a there's a way to say that it's a gap so this excuse me there's a there's a way it's called a gap in this encoding thing so that it's saying that this part is not encoded there's a gap so if I were using an archival letter that had like a big water stain or was torn I would identify that as a gap so I just used the gap for any of the handwritten kind of Japanese Chinese they were language scholars so they had a lot of conversations about Chinese and Japanese language dictionaries they would make dictionaries and stuff so so my project was having to learn that and having to write it but it's essentially just files and so this site is a site that I found a project that was in beta and what they do is render it display your encoding and it's not fully functional that's why it's highlighted but it's not quite there should be something hovering there because the project that the technology I wanted to use there's encoding and then you have to have a way to display them and a program that will make use of all that tagging I did and again that's where I was my much larger project than just the capstone so I did encode a few letters I made this kind of like database of names and topics and people that appear in the letters so that I could kind of do the cross referencing but I wasn't building a display you know mechanism so I found this thing that will show it a little bit online just to kind of play with but I'm I can't quite see but otherwise so my document has some information I can pull up the others projects here oh my gosh I can't see the cursor there's Megan's project you want to talk about it no no it's fine so this is like the it's okay no it's fine oh we lost it so but so my entry on there like there's a document and then there's a bunch of XML files just files I'm basically submitted files and and a document so that's what I ended up submitting yeah so it's not really it's it's not an actual project yet because the later yeah that's the idea that later you could even sort of have the letters displayed differently like sort of like more graphically so it's not just the same letter yeah I mean the idea was that you could kind of point and click and jump through different so if I only cared about reading about the little Tokyo newspaper the Rafu Shimpo that they were dealing with the type of that the actual type from the newspaper place because this whole thing so there's like tens of letters where they discussed this newspaper and it's like that might be interesting for people who I know that people have studied you know the Japanese American community and newspapers and all this stuff so being able to pull that out but it's you know yeah I could do it forever it'll never be done oh couldn't really quickly sorry there's a sign-up sheet there so if you had RSVP you can just check your name off but if you didn't RSVP I have been it just oh I I moved it and it got disconnected so I thought it would turn it off yeah yeah so do you guys want to just spend a second telling us a little bit more about your projects and then sure I have a hard time talking about my project because I don't really know what I did what does it look like it's that's a good question so are you it's a text it is yeah it's a text but it's a series of fragments in which I'm incorporating like experimental writing poetry creative nonfiction so it's just flowing in and out of different genres and I'm also utilizing very heavily Winnecott who's a psychoanalytic thinker so I'm interspersing his ideas and having that be a theoretical framework for me in order to sort of like support my own creative writing which is mainly looking at my own like internal world and my mental health my experience with my mother and my family and just like interspersing that with with various theoretical frameworks mainly from a psychoanalytic and it's all flowing a text like just a chronology sequentially right it isn't sort of like it's definitely marginal right right no like this it's very sequential but it's like it's like stream of consciousness and you're sort of going in and out and somewhat it kind of jumps around a lot so it's not very fluid necessarily I mean certain parts are gonna be more fluid but it's definitely because the stream of conscious is going to jump from different topic to topic so you're kind of like jumping around a little bit and and it's very somewhat ambiguous so you're not quite sure because I'm not quite sure what I'm writing about in terms of my like psyche in my internal world and my mental health I'm not quite sure what I'm getting at so the reader doesn't quite know what I'm getting at either so it's sort of this like ambiguous exploration of my mental health like through a psychoanalytic lens so sounds a lot more complicated than it is it's just kind of a muddled piece of writing and sounds really interesting I think for my project I mean let me give you guys like a back a little background on Maxine Tom Kingston and her memoir so it's and there's the baits over the years about whether or not this is considered all about biography or is it you know just fiction writing or is it like a little bit of both right so it's it's broken down to five chapters and it's sort of about this girl who grew up in Cali and sort of her upbringing and how she grew up in Asian-American in this little town and her family likes to tell her all these stories right about you know mythology and also stories from back home in China and all these like myths right and she never could quite tell you know what is real and what is sort of just stories so she goes into tangent about you know writing about this this lost aunt right who committed suicide and it's like well what really happened to this aunt and then she writes about this myth about you know this woman warrior you know who you know braves a storm and then comes back and kills this horrible Emperor and then she writes about her her other aunt who is sort of her mother's sister and how it went by coming to the States here because she ended up you know kind of just losing herself a little bit over the years and so that's kind of the backdrop of it and kind of when me coming in right it's more about okay well I've had similar experiences right that I could kind of relate to but sort of like how is my experience relatable to Maxine Hong Kingston's sort of narrative and how I play around with language and be able to experiment with my own writing to kind of retell a similar narrative but in a different way or different format so that was where the project came in and then at the end the white paper piece was me trying to connect it to and sort of that was where I explained you know how certain things were able to link together and sort of what my approach was like and sort of like what my writing process what was it that I found out or discovered about myself and sort of and then connecting it back to a little bit of research I would say so it's very minimal there in terms of sort of some of the I guess dialogue that's already there around Maxine So I have another question about like to pausing the white paper and submitting the project yeah so if the project is like a non-digital format then like who do I like submit it to and like is the deadline the same as the white paper because I know it's like the almost like so can you just explain what your project is well I'm in fashion studies oh great yeah so and I do I look as a fashion designer so I'm not like quite sure but maybe it's gonna be like a portfolio or like a garment or a sample of some kind of a more of a hard like actual project instead of like digitized so I'm like so Roxanne is actually the perfect person yes and so I would say close to that is recently there was a capstone where the student had kind of recreated a high school binder trapper keeper that was the project so it was very kind of material so it was life-writing I think and there was an actual binder that had you know different kind of collages and different telling the story and so early on she and her advisor contacted the library to say well what is what are we gonna submit here and does that mean she has to give up the binder you know like is it going to live in the library our library does not have an archives and a conservation and preservation group like many libraries would so we just weren't kind of equipped equipped yeah to to give it the kind of preservation and also access we don't have a reading room necessarily that somebody would come and look at this original object so we decided that we would accept a record we called it a digital facsimile so basically a high quality scan of the cover and every single page that's what the library would keep and this was decided in consultation with the advisor as well serve some version of it because the idea of the the capstone I think and you can speak to this I can't up is a research project that can be more ephemeral and so you know I guess that we've spoken sometimes about the idea of performance or something you know and what kind of capturing of that research we need to have to provide to other people so it's really like a one by one or yeah as case by case basis no no so I mean well we'd have to work it out so I guess the the answer is that you should talk with your advisor and and then contact me as well to figure out what makes sense for what your project is I mean if it's a lot of different material things that we can't necessarily preserve then yeah so I'm like similarly have like an art arts background if I were to like curate like an exhibition I say in like a small gallery space then what is like the thing that I'm submitting is it just like the white paper and like documentation from the event or right yeah I mean some of that is again talked about with the advisor and the program you know Karen and Lizzie the library will try to save whatever it makes the most sense right catalog right right there have been people who've done photography without any kind of exhibit or even somebody submitted poems and images and the images weren't actually it was the whole point was not to present them in a specific way like not to actually collect them in a book like a catalog or anything like that she just wanted the photo files just the files no presentation of them because that's how the advisor had you know they looked at the actual photographs and since we so it was it was but we work with it right we work with whatever makes sense for the bunch of files we have a bunch of and yeah and the text and the white paper and you know all of these pieces but ordinarily we would say oh just put the you know the other people have done photographs they put them in a PDF and then we can view the photographs that way but for this person because the creative process that they had gone through it was like they weren't to be put in a PDF so we kept the photographs you know we'll do what we can are these are capstones graded or are they graded or these season capstones are not graded so you you will register for something called thesis advising with your thesis advisor and that's a pass-fail class and so you'll pass the class when you submit your thesis and it gets approved by the program yeah so that's why I bring in all these people in conversation when you're thinking about what am I going to submit and what's going to count for this it's good to think about that currently like custom projects that are because I like looked through that database of it and I was trying to like look for ones with like illustrations or like something with like a like a visual do you see a lot of those are most of the time people use a website for that type of just medium okay right so that the trapper keeper was new for us the idea that they really wanted a material like physical and then and then putting images into a PDF is usually if you're not going to put it online but a lot of people that with the visual or there was the one that was done using the story maps the GIS you know it was about it was called it was about campus sexual violence and and it was this great like you know visual and textual like scrolling website kind of experience so they can get creative be a PowerPoint to I have had PowerPoint submitted that's true because we can we can accommodate most file types you had also asked when is it due so the so the due dates are the same for the capstones so the basically the capstones and theses are due on January 10th if you're registered for the fall and then if you're registered for the spring either April 10th if you want to graduate in May or August 25th if you want to graduate in October and those are the dates that they're due to us and they're due to the malls program about three weeks before that the ultimate library deposit date but that's really the final approved version that you need to give to the malls program so that we can confirm that it that you should deposit in the library do people have more questions yeah I just have one less question yeah it's like way it's like very early for me to like you know like to start talking to professors looking for an advisor it's never too early never yeah so I mean I had people in my intro class who that semester were like I kind of think that maybe I want you to be my advisor and then I just continue to have relationships with them until they start writing the thesis oh okay yeah okay because I know that your professor like they can dedicate like one semester to like advising you right so so that means I mean you're asking a really good question so so faculty get paid for one semester to advise you and they get a fifth of a class for it so for every five students that they advise they get the course off which is quite substantial and so but I but for me when I work with students I imagine that a project will take about six about six to eight months so for example I'm working with somebody now who I'm meeting every few weeks who is planning to deposit in April but we really started meeting in October so even though I'm gonna get the credit to advise her in the spring semester I want to be meeting with her now so that we can really talk about where she's going with the project people typically don't do it in a semester is where people typically don't do it in the semester it's pretty unusual like did any of you do it in a semester you did it in the semester I did yeah but you said it was a semester and a half I mean because technically I used a paper that I wrote for a previous class to like expand upon but I started working with your advisor that that previous semester mm-hmm so I know I technically only worked on it for one semester yeah I mean that definitely happens people definitely do it more quickly like somebody we had somebody on a capstone panel and she was like I did the whole thing in six weeks so there's that version also it depends on the project mm-hmm it depends on the project and your process and what your advisor wants from you and stuff like that if you need advice on like like scoping your like project because as I know what my like kind of vaguely know what my topic is but it's just like there's so much out there I'd like started doing research and reading but if I need advice on that do I just like speak to our like advising fellows you should really find an advisor because the product the project you'll see once you get an advisor that it will be really helpful so like you have an idea in mind and you have like a million ways that you can go and you're starting to do research but that's why it's useful to talk to an advisor is because then they can be like oh it sounds like this is what you're interested in and then you can be like no that's not what I'm interested in I'm actually interested in this but it's through that dialogue that you'll be able to narrow the scope of what you're interested in and figure out where you're headed so I mean I'm giving you that advice because that's what could what would be useful to me but but it's also possible like I was very clear about that but you don't need to also because it's possible that you're having a pretty good time kind of like feeling around and figuring out what you want to do and that you're not interested in finding an advisor to be part of those conversations until a little bit later so it's really up to you but if you are feeling at all like it could be useful to be in dialogue with somebody about this but you don't want to find an advisor because it's too early that that that second half isn't right and and that doesn't mean that they're going to start meeting with you every couple of weeks two years before you write your thesis but even just like a couple of you know I have some students who like I have a student now who I know we're going to be working together in the spring and he's come to my office hours like twice this semester so we're not meeting a lot he's not really starting very very significantly well he's doing his one of his final papers is going to go into the thesis but like I know that in the spring we'll meet more often but we still are have been in dialogue about the project for longer but it really is your preference what feels right you know and I think that it was really nice to hear from this panel that that they're looking for different things and an advisor yeah yeah I mean I think I really agree because I think it's good to just speak with different faculty members in the very beginning to get a sense of well whether or not that faculty can potentially be your advisor but also kind of learn a little bit about yourself right about what your interests are because I mean I never thought I was interested about teaching and like you know pedagogy but as I started to sit down with one of my professors and he was you know you're really interested about higher ed and teaching methods I'm like oh you know I didn't realize that it was just kind of happened like in that semester when I took a course with him and we had these meetings right and then as later on when I found Nancy right that was when I was like oh my goodness they're like there's so much written about Maxine I could do things I could do psychoanalysis I could like do about teaching Asian-American literature in the classroom you know there's like gender studies and there's like queer studies right written about it and I'm like what do I do you know and Nancy was really good about kind of helping me to sort of like take things out and kind of like help me rediscover myself a little bit yeah could you collaborate like for instance in I'm sorry to single you out but it's it's really all of the projects are intriguing might you have been able to collaborate let's let's say with just a new media artist and who might have worked with you and you know you put your whole project together and they were the ones that sort of created this graphical design and worked with the HTML or they got separate coder in right well so I mean part of it was the the approach to my project I mentioned that I had just finished library school so I was really interested in what in kind of figuring out the difference between a librarian doing this work and a not librarian and so this idea of digital history as a field where they're doing similar encoding work and making these decisions that are classifying and discovery related I wanted to kind of experience it from the non-library view and part of my writing was about trying to figure out what the difference is in the approach and for me the difference was that the historians do a lot more interpretation than librarians are willing to to do because they want to like have all people be able to use this not just listen to what I have to say right so there were different approaches and the experience of doing the digital part is what I was aiming for it wasn't to have this like beautiful thing it was really about me going through the experience of the digital process so that was that's really your thesis yeah I mean that's what I discuss anyway so you know one day it would maybe make a very nice finished digital project but that wasn't really my goal but you might have but so it's you're not really precluded from actually working with other collaborators who might format things or yeah there's that if there's like the digital humanities lab here right so there's the new media lab as well I looked at working there there's there's like fellows and people who will help advise and work through the technical stuff but I mean it's I mean the question of collaborating is interesting because you're not allowed to have co-authors to this kind of degree requirement so you're excuse me you're not allowed to have co-authors right now that you're you would be the content provider but they would they would you know create all the graphical right you know I mean I guess I'm just I don't know what's appropriate for this kind of a project like if you were just talking about how to get my project finished as a project in the world and definitely looking for people to collaborate with in that way but to complete the degree requirement I wouldn't necessarily be yeah I think I agree with Roxanne so you wouldn't want to be hiring somebody to do the coding if you did a digital capstone because the point of the digital capstone is for you to produce it even if it might have a life after it after it's your capstone and you would hire somebody to like complete that work so what if you wanted to make a documentary you would have to shoot it and edit it yourself yeah we have had people make films and they they produce the films yeah there's no collaboration at all like really so what are you thinking about I'm nothing I'm just trying to do a performance and you had a you weren't you didn't want to be the performer but you had written them this life right and you were like a director and yeah you're directing yeah so I mean I guess I guess I guess when you were asking about a digital project usually digital projects the project is the digital project right so like if you want to direct a film and you need people to help you produce it like the project is you directing the film so you wouldn't want to co-direct the film but you could certainly collaborate with other people on the film do you see what I'm saying yeah I know what you're saying but I do think that it's very personal so whatever you come up with in dialogue with your thesis advisor and with the program we could just figure it out oh okay I mean I guess one other thing I might want to add is I don't know how many of you are up to that these capstone stage but that semester you may or may not be taking another class along with the capstone so you might want to think about you know that other class that you're taking how much weight right I mean so what I did since I was doing this life writing project I took a life writing course so in that sense a lot of the work I was already doing that class kind of correlated with my project so it helped a lot so I mean I know in the math program we kind of encourage students to kind of explore and kind of figure out what you want but I think that very last semester it's not time for you to explore it's time for you to get down and get this project done right so whatever that second course you're gonna take find something that either you're maybe really it's already familiar with right or something that you think might go hand in hand with the whatever project it is that you're working on so it will help you in the end questions or do you want to talk about your projects that you're working on thank you so much thank you