James Hawkins

Capstone 12-2

Jocie Kopfman

6/6/22

Capstone Final Reflection Essay

1. Why capstones?

Capstone’s are important because they’re a form of researching a topic that is meaningful to you

as an individual. Capstone’s are all about topics that you have interest in, and how you can do

work in order to make that topic impactful to you, or the broader community as a whole. But

even more important that the actual product of a capstone is the experience, and how going

through the experience impacted you. This is important because a capstone can lead into being

used as a career focus in the future. So by settling on a certain area of focus, this might translate

into helping you to understand what you might want to do in the future as a career. And this is

especially enticing because this is something that you’re truly passionate about, not something

that you’re being forced to learn about that you don’t understand or have interest in like certain

core classes.

2. How and why did you choose your topic, your idea for a physical product?

I chose to do my topic for a variety of reasons actually. The first reason was because of Jalen

Nowden’s project. After seeing her project I knew I wanted to pursue doing a capstone project

during my senior year of high school. I just didn’t know where exactly I wanted to focus. Around

the same time that I learned about Jalen’s capstone project, one of my very close friends died by

suicide and this really impacted my own mental health greatly. I never had to deal with one of

my closest friends dying, let alone by suicide and because of this I felt very guilty that I couldn’t
do anything in order to help take away their pain. And this whole experience was very painful for

me to go through, especially not having many people around me to talk to at the time. Following

this, the day before my sophomore year began, my mom was hospitalized due to having a brain

aneurysm. This really affected my mental health because I thought that she was going to die. As

a 15 year old this is very difficult for me to process that one of the main contributors to my well

being might die. This experience caused me to have several anxiety and panic attacks, and some

of the conversations that I had with her prior to her getting surgery made things even worse for

my mental health. Following this the Black Lives Matter Protests of 2020 began, and I spent

most of my time everyday advocating against the injustices happening to Black people.

However, between juggling advocating on my personal time and co-running my club Students of

Color + Allies where we talk about these types of issues, I began to experience burnout. So I

began to wonder, what could I do in order to address some of these symptoms that I’m feeling

myself when it comes to mental health concerns. These thoughts began to make me wonder

about other people who may be going through similar circumstances as well. Then during my

junior year of high school, I had a history teacher who addressed me in ways that were damaging

to my mental/emotional health because the things he would say were very racist when addressing

me. This experience finally led me to coming to the conclusion that I should focus my capstone

project on Black student mental health.

3. How often did you work on your project (when did you meet with your mentor)? Discuss

your experiences as you worked on the project.

I worked on my project very frequently throughout my senior year, especially towards the

beginning of the year. This was mainly because I was so passionate about this work so I spent

most of my time working on my capstone project. But I came to realize that I needed to find
more of a balance between working on my capstone project, while also making sure I’m making

time for myself to make sure that I’m still in good mental health, as well as balancing my school

work and college applications. This at first was something that was a little challenging but I was

able to figure it out after a little bit of time as well as having several conversations with Jocie.

However, as time went on this became a lot more difficult because of major events that were

occurring in my life, such as multiple deaths in the family, another very negative run in with my

former history teacher, and also having to deal with the very stressful and dramatic environment

that was transpiring within the class of 2022. This made things very difficult for me to focus on

anything besides my own mental health, because so many things were happening all at once so I

was very overwhelmed and didn’t really know how exactly to process everything. However,

once I began to have more time free up for myself I was able to manage my stress as well as

prioritizing more of my capstone project. I didn’t meet with my capstone mentor a lot because

when it came to my project it wasn’t something that I really needed to meet about every week for

a progress report or for help because it was very self explanatory what I needed to do. I just made

sure that I was doing everything that I was supposed to be doing for the advancement of my

project.

4. What were some of the biggest problems you encountered as you worked on the project

from beginning to end?

Without a doubt the biggest challenge that I had to deal with during this project was managing

my own stress and mental health concerns. This type of a project is a very heavy topic to work

on, but with the addition of many outside stressors that occurred, it made dealing with working

on this project even more difficult for me. But in the end I was able to accomplish all that I had

wanted in terms of this project.

 5. What did you do to manage your time?

I really had to organize my time based on what I thought was most important to the project. For

the most part I was focused on interviewing other people, but the thing that I found to be difficult

was that I was interviewing others but I wasn’t actually doing the editing until later. So I was

hearing what they were telling me but this information wasn’t getting put on my podcast.

Eventually I did get around to editing, and publishing episodes for my podcast but it was a while

before I actually got around to doing the editing which was a fault on my part. However, I still

published all of the episodes that I wanted.

6. Were your original goals for your project carried out? How were they different?

My original goal with this project was just to find a solution to the mental health disparities

within the Black community. Over a couple weeks I ended up narrowing my topic to Black

students in high school and in college. I didn’t originally plan on making a podcast until a week

before the first trimester ended. Once I did I felt like that podcast was truly a way for me to make

an impact.

7. How did you challenge yourself? How did you overcome obstacles?

So I feel like I challenged myself just by doing this project in general. The reason I say this is

because when I first started doing research on this topic, Jocie and I had a pretty important

conversation. Basically, she asked me if I really wanted to continue working on this project,

because I had already done so much work when it came to racial inequity. Basically she was

giving me an out to not have to bear the burden of continuous reminders of the experiences that

I’ve gone through. But instead I told Jocie that I wanted to do this, because I wanted to not only

be able to help others who might be struggling and going through circumstances similar to my

own. But I also wanted to be able to use this project as a way to process and heal through all of
the painful experiences, so that I’d be able to move forward without them affecting me so much.

So from there what I had to do in order to make sure that mentally I was in a good place while

working on this project, I had to do constant check-ins with Jocie to tell her about the good, the

bad, and the indifferent, because that was the easiest way I could go about processing everything.

The other thing that I had to do was know when I needed to take time in order to distance myself

from working on my project as that helped me to come back to working on it much more

efficiently.

8. What was your experience of the presentation? How do you feel it went? What surprised

you? What did you take away from your own experience and also watching others?

So in the days leading up to presenting I was a little nervous because I felt like I wasn’t getting

the presentation right. So I kept practicing over and over again until I felt like it was good

enough, but for some reason it always felt like something was missing while I was practicing and

it confused me at times because I didn’t know what that something was. Then before I went up to

present I was very nervous about it because I knew that doing this presentation was my one

chance to show everyone what my experience was like while also educating them on some facts,

but I was still nervous because something felt off. And to see how high the bar was set as my

classmates were presenting only made me even more nervous. But once I got up to present I felt

like everything was going to be alright and I was able to relax, and I think that sense of

relaxation was the one thing that was missing the entire time. I was so focused on getting it right

that it made me nervous and it felt wrong as I was practicing. But when I was able to relax

everything was able to come out fluidly and I was able to formulate better sentences rather than

reading off of a script. I think what surprised me the most was how relaxed I was when I got up

to present. Now I think that I might’ve been speaking a little bit fast but other than that I think
that everything was very relaxed and free flowing compared to the practice runs I had. I think my

biggest takeaway from the experience as a whole was that I should go into things relaxed and

hoping that things will play out in my favor, because otherwise it leads to a lot of overthinking

on my end which only leads to stress and anxiety building up.

9. What else would you like your audience to know about your experience of your

capstone?

I feel like the one thing that I want my audience to know is that there are a lot of things that not

everything that went on during this project was joyful. Many of the things that I learned from

some of the interviews I did were very hard to take in as they were very triggering subjects. On

top of that many of the things that I had to deal with outside of when I was working on this

project really affected my mental health. But by taking time away from everything in order to

process all that was going on both in school as well as my personal life during this time, I was

able to make my way through this project effectively.

10. What advice would you give to a new capstone student?

My biggest piece of advice that I’d give to a new capstone student is to take care of yourself.

Make sure that you’re mentally in a good place in order to work on your project, because if

you’re not eventually that will lead you to becoming burned out. Something big that I’d

recommend is to ensure that you have someone who you’re able to talk to and process things

with. Whether it be a close friend, a teacher, a sibling, or a parent, make sure that you have

someone to talk to because that’s really going to make a big difference for your mental and

emotional wellbeing.