My TESU Liberal Arts Capstone Experience

[kevinmane]

Thanks for all of this info, it's extremely helpful.

Does the project require a lot of original research, or are you just synthesizing what's already out there? i think there was some question on this earlier.

Also, you suggested picking "American History," does this mean you don't necessarily have to pick a topic related to your area of study?

For your first question, it's a combination of original research and stating what's already out there. For instance, you could pose the question "Should the Electoral College be abolished?" To begin, you would have to state what the Electoral College is all about and reference what is already out there on this topic (this is basically the first two modules). Modules 3-5 are more focused on the original research. You could pose many claims where the Electoral College has failed America and times when it was beneficial. Then you could compare the pros vs cons and state your own opinion in Module 5 on whether you think it should be abolished or not based on what you've researched.

For your second question, for the LIB-495 class, you can pick ANY topic you want. If you were taking a Business Capstone of some kind, I'm sure the topics would be limited to Business. But since Liberal Arts includes Social Science, Humanities, Natural Science, and Math subjects, you could pretty much write about anything. One person in my class wrote about how Artificial Intelligence should be better monitored so we don't eventually get taken over by robots or end up in a "WALL-E" situation. Another person wrote about how healthcare professionals should get more time off so they don't accidentally screw up an operation. Not surprisingly, the student who wrote about Artificial Intelligence works at an IT company and the person who wrote about healthcare professionals is a nurse. So they picked topics that they knew a lot about; I'm sure that helped them keep interested as well as gave them some foreknowledge of where to find content to reference in their paper. I work as an Admin Assistant for a government agency, so it is quite boring. I've always loved history so I just picked a topic within American History and went with it. I'm assuming the same could be done for history enthusiasts or just for people who have no idea what they should write about.

Good luck!