Capstone Begins!

     I started taking my capstone class, the one that's supposed to be a culmination of all my work in college, and it is fantastic! I absolutely love who I'll be working with and our professor/mentor is supportive and cares about both the product and the experience. We'll be looking at "Words + Image = Picture" as our theme and I got really excited to work with movies and children's adaptations and all sorts of combinations of literal images juxtaposed against words and the images created through text.
     The first thing I thought of was "It's like when they picked Daniel Radcliffe to be Harry Potter!" Now, I do like Daniel Radcliffe as HP, but he isn't what I pictured when I read the first book in my head. I don't remember anymore what I imagined him to look like, but it certainly wasn't like in the movie. Similar things have happened with other stories I've seen turned into movies: Eragon, the Lord of the Rings series, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days, just to name a few.
     Now we've received the syllabus and had a chance to look through the books. There are books about photography, there are short essays, there are long essays, there are works about works about pain, there are photographs, there are novels: the scope of the writing is amazing and I am so excited to take the class and start working on my final project that I don't know what to do with myself.
     We started work right on Day 1, collecting work from throughout our lives and condensing it into a single portfolio that will be the "Portrait of a English Major". From this work we will develop our personal statements to be read when we present our final papers--the climax of each student's work in the English Department. So far my portfolio was 99 pages long, and I still can add to it (for which I am grateful, I'm taking a couple classes I want to add into the mix).
     I am nervous that I'll get too wrapped up in the fun of this work and lose track of my other classes, or that I'll swamp myself with more than I can chew. But this is what life is about: taking the chances and making mistakes while there's someone who can pick me up and say "Might want to try that another way." I go to Day 3 in the morning and have my first conference with my professor after class. I'm excited, nervous, and ready to get rolling on this project.

Just a thought....
Stephie