The capstone is a unique and demanding challenge.

In completing it, what did

you learn about your subject? Your skill set? Yourself?
The thing that I learned after doing my capstone was that being a cook might sound like
its an easy job but when you work inside the kitchen for a certain number of hours you
can get really tired in a short amount of time. To be honest over my time of working
there i would only go there for around 2 hours on the weekends but would go for 3
hours occasionally, and in those 2 hours i would get so tired that I would just come
home take a shower and just sleep for like 2-3 hours, but i really couldn't imagine how
the people that work there 6 days a week would feel like after working a full-time shift!
After completing it I learned that being a cook is not an easy job, and that it takes a lot
of time for you to be good at making just one dish. The one I learned about my skills
was that it turns out that I am fairly good at following the other person after taking some
notes down, this might sound like a weird skill but whenever my mentor would cook
something i would look at how he is doing it and would type the notes down on my
phone and would try to follow them in the exact same way as he did.
How is your project relevant to you, the school, or community?
My project is relevant to me because if my first options don't work out for the future my
other plan would be to become a cook, and so this project really helped me by
telling/showing me what i need to expect when i join this line of work and it also taught
me that cooking may seem it’s easy but it’s actually not. My project would be relevant to
the community because in the future let’s say if I were to become a chef then I would be
able to make some authentic food for the community which they can enjoy!
How did you demonstrate the six core competencies throughout this project?
• The first one would be personal awareness and responsibility
I demonstrated this competency by taking responsibility for making my website and
finishing it on time and also how I used my time wisely. An example of that would be I
would be taking notes of how my mentor is making the dish and I would try my best to
make the notes as detailed as possible because if they weren't then I would miss a step
while making the dish and would possibly end up messing the entire thing.
• Social responsibility
The way I used this would be under building relationships. I used this by communicating
with the people working in the kitchen and got to know them a little more and got to
know some facts about them and their life, and they also got to learn some things about
me.
• Critical thinking
The way I used critical thinking would fall under assessing my progress. This really
came in handy because whenever i would make a dish at the restaurant like the pasta i
made, if i didn’t like it or if i had missed a step and had added some extra water into the
sauce and it turned out to be way to liquid then i would come back and try to make the
sauce again at my house to make sure that i can make it without messing up
• Communication
This would fall under Collaborate to plan, carry out and review, an example of this would
be in the first week of when I had started my capstone project. I used this competency
when my mentor and I sat down together and started discussing what dishes I should
add to my website and how many dishes I would need to add to fill in the hours.
• Personal & Cultural Identity
This would fall under the I know my strengths and what makes me unique, an example
of that would be whenever i had to add some ingredients at a certain amount, I would
mess up a little bit because i would have no idea which spices are which because they
would all mostly be the same color, which would catch me off guard and i would add
some other spice. But i got to know one of my strength from working which is that it
turns out that i am pretty fast at cutting, by cutting i mean like how i had to make the
noodles, i had to cut all the veggies into tiny species and i was thinking that it would
take me like 20 minutes just to cut all of them, but it only took me like 5-10 minutes only,
which was half the time i had predicted!
What impact, if any, did your project have?
One main impact this project had on me would be the fact that now whenever I go to a
restaurant to eat out or to take out, I would always try my best to finish all the food on
the plate. When I was younger my mom used to tell me to finish all my food and not to
take extra if i can't finish it because it would go to waste and all the challenging work the
people in the restaurant had done would go to waste, and to be honest i would just
ignore her and just forget about it, but now after working inside a restaurant as a chef
for 40 hours, now i have realized why my mom used to tell me these things because
now i have experienced the demanding work in real life!

Whole process and finished product - what are you most proud of?
I am most proud of the fact that now I can make some food all by myself without any
help. The reason I am proud is because I believe that everyone should know at least a
couple of things that they can cook at home, because you cannot just order your food
from the skip the dishes every day or eat outside like subway or mcdonalds every day.
What was a difficulty you encountered and how did you solve the problem?
One difficulty i encountered was that my mom would have to drive me to the restaurant
every weekend and would have to wait there or go somewhere else for 2 hours and
come back and pick me up, which wasn’t really nice of me because she also has a life
of her own and i really didn’t want to take her with me because it would ruin her
personal time, so i thought of a solution which was that i could ask my mentor if he
would pick me up from my house and take me there and after my mom could pick me
up from the restaurant and take me home. And so, I asked him, and he said that it was
ok with him, and so ever since then I would just go with him.

What is one thing about your finished project you wish you could change? Why?
If there’s one thing, I could change from the finished project it would be the fact that I
could add some more photos of myself and the dishes I made, because right now I only
have somewhere around 5-7 photos on it and I really wanted to add some more but I
had forgotten about it.

What advice would you give to a student who will be completing their capstone
project next year?
Ok so if i were to give a student some advice for their capstone project, i would actually
give two pieces of advice, the first one would be that don’t be afraid of the minimum
time. By that i mean there is a requirement that says that we must put at least 40 hours
into our capstone project or more, and to be honest when i had first read that i was so
nervous because at that time 40 hours seemed like it was a lot and that i probably
wouldn’t be able to meet the requirement at all, but as the I kept going to the restaurant
and started working on my capstone, I had realized that the 40 hours had just passed
by in a snap! Now the reason that happened to me was because I had enjoyed doing
my capstone which leads me to my second advice which is that you should pick one
strand from the options that you really like rather than picking something that your friend
is doing. The reason behind is that let's say you pick one strand that your friend is doing
and you start doing it to, but as you start digging into it it may turn out that you don’t
enjoy doing it, and at a certain point you might be too late to fix it, and which in that case
might lead you to not enjoying it which is gonna leave you just to fulfill the requirement
rather than learning something new!

What source of research helped you the most? Or least?

To be honest the most helpful source would probably be Jstor because the answer to
the inquiry question I had was a little hard to find and so I had looked at other sources
that were listed but Jstor really helped me a lot because it allowed me to find articles
and research studies done in the past!

What is one thing about your approach to your project you wish you could
change? Why? Well now to be honest there is nothing that would change about my
project because i feel that the project was just perfect!