Just finished my Lib Arts Capstone at TESU

[jsh1138]

As students who have recently completed the capstone, would you say it would have been possible for you to better prepare for the capstone before it started? If so, how?  

Could you have chosen a topic and begun surveys, research, and possibly even drafting before the course officially began? Would trying that be foolish?

Thanks for sharing your final drafts! I've worked in fiction editing, so I can edit in the Chicago style all day long, but APA editing with citations and everything is hard for me, so your examples are extremely helpful!

well some professors want MLA or whatever, it just depends on who you get. I think it actually depends on the kind of paper it is too. 

if i had it to do over again, i would say the #1 thing I would do differently would be to pick a question before i went in, and to narrow it down more. my original draft had something like 8 sub questions, and only really 2 of them i was interested in but i felt i had to do the other 6 to get to them, and because i basically ran out of time i had to trim off 3 sub questions, including the 2 i wanted to do most. if i had it to do over again, i would construct a question with maybe 3 subs at most so i could do the paper faster and with less effort, because i spent a ton of time researching this and i really think it wasn't necessary, tbh

so find something that's narrow enough so that you don't have to kill yourself, you aren't going to change the world with a capstone paper or whatever, just fulfill the requirements and turn it in. 

getting to the issue of if you could have done the research ahead of time or not, i think you could but the adviser or professor or whoever is going to have suggestions that might change things quite a bit so i would just pick a question, research the topic and then wait on writing til they ok your question. i kept learning new things while i was researching and adding things on and i should have avoided that as much as possible