Begin With the End in Mind
The Capstone, In Detail
Everything you do in bootcamp and during your placement builds toward one morning at the end of the semester — the Capstone Breakfast, Tuesday, December 15, 8–10 AM, with the Field Experience Spotlight and the Field Experience Showcase in the BFAC Lobby. Here's exactly what that looks like, so nothing about it is a surprise. The capstone is 25% of your course grade, split across your Spotlight talk, your Showcase presentation, and your portfolio.
Everything below tells you what to prepare. The Capstone Rubric tells you exactly what each score means — five criteria per part, on the same 4/3.5/3/2/1 scale as the rest of the course. The format is yours to decide; the criteria are not.
Where: the BFAC Lobby. You'll staff a station showing what you actually did during your Field Experience — not a summary of the course, but evidence of your specific placement. What's on it depends heavily on what kind of work you did.
This runs as a pop-up presentation: guests circulate through the lobby, and when someone stops at your station you give them a 60–90 second walkthrough of your work, then take their follow-up questions. You'll do that over and over for the length of the event, for people who know nothing about your placement. The skill being tested here isn't public speaking — it's being able to do it well the tenth time, to someone who just walked up.
- 1. Your Skills Evidence Board. This is the biggest part. A board (Canva at 11x17 and printed, or a bigger board) showing how you met each of the ten employability skills during your internship: a photo or artifact and one sentence per skill. It doesn't need to be huge. It needs to stand out and be labeled correctly. Plan it on the template first. Template + example
- 2. Something real from your work that guests can touch. An interactive piece you can point to and say "here's what I learned, look at this." A plumber brings pipe and fittings, a salon intern brings foil or color samples, an engineer brings a blueprint or CAD print, a teacher's intern brings a lesson they taught. Simple is fine. It just has to be real and worth talking about.
- 3. A visual of your experience. Either a picture/deliverable board, or a Chromebook, iPad, or laptop running a slideshow of photos and work you did. If you use a device, have it charged, looping, and ready with no logins.
- 4. Your resume, displayed on the table where guests can read it.
- 5. Your table card with your name, placement, and career field. We print these for you.
A guest should be able to walk up and know right away: that's the plumbing table, that's the salon table. Photos and anything from your workplace need your supervisor's permission, so ask early.
- Arrive at the time your teacher sets — stations need to be fully set up before doors open, not while guests are walking in. Your setup is scored before doors open
- Professional appearance — same standard as your mock interview, not just "nice for school"
- You're staffing the station the entire time. This isn't a poster you walk away from — you present to every person who stops
- Label your artifacts. While you're talking to one guest, two more are reading your table — the labels work for you when your mouth is busy
Where: the Black Box — the small stage in the Fine Arts Center. Real stage, real audience, seated and listening to you specifically. This is not a classroom presentation.
At a set time during the event you'll deliver a 1 minute 30 second Spotlight talk on yourself and your experience. Live, timed, no notes on a phone. This is your Field Experience Spotlight: practiced, earned, and specific to what you actually did.
That is the whole thing. Fully prepared, no questions to answer, nothing to react to. Two things have to come through in your 90 seconds: why this experience mattered, and how it is shaping where you go next.
"Hi, I'm Jordan, and I spent my semester at Batavia Animal Hospital in the Health Sciences cluster. Most days I was restraining animals for exams, cleaning and prepping treatment rooms, and by the end I was trusted to walk new clients through post-surgery care instructions on my own. The moment that stuck with me was the first time a vet asked my opinion on a case — not because I knew the answer, but because I'd shown up enough that she trusted me to think it through with her. Going in, I thought I wanted human medicine. Now I'm looking hard at veterinary school instead."
Ninety seconds is shorter than it sounds, and the students who do this well decided in advance exactly what they wanted to say. The Spotlight Prep Sheet walks you through prompts for each of the four pieces above, with space to draft. Broad strokes of what it asks you to think about:
- A challenge or setback you faced — and what you did about it
- A person at your placement who taught you something
- A time you were wrong, corrected, or surprised
- Advice you'd give next year's student going into your placement
- How this experience changed your plans — or confirmed them
- A skill you didn't expect to need
You will not use all of this material. Ninety seconds is about 200–230 words, so you will use maybe three or four of these answers. The reason to work through all of them is to find your best three or four instead of settling for the first ones you thought of.
Your weekly reflections are the raw material. That's what they've been for all semester.
Your portfolio is what's on your station and what backs up your pitch. It's scored separately from the other two parts — and unlike them, there is no required list of contents.
That's deliberate. A welding student and an accounting student shouldn't be handing in the same portfolio. Instead of a checklist you get a standard: bring evidence of what you actually did, enough to show range, organized so a stranger understands it, and be able to explain every piece. How you meet that standard is your call.
- What did you actually do here? Not what the company does — what you made, fixed, wrote, built, or contributed to
- Can you show more than one kind of thing? One artifact repeated four times isn't range
- Can you prove you grew? A before-and-after is the most convincing artifact in any portfolio
- Would a stranger understand it without you? Label everything — one line each
- Are you allowed to show it? Ask your supervisor early. Nothing confidential, ever
The photo you didn't take, the draft you didn't save, the project thrown out in October — those are gone. Take five minutes every Friday to save something from that week, even if you're not sure you'll use it. Students who do this have too much to choose from. Students who don't spend the last week apologizing for an empty table.
Not sure what counts for your placement? The Portfolio Guide has the full rubric plus concrete artifact ideas for all seven career clusters — what works in health sciences versus IT versus the trades — and a list of what doesn't count. Read it in your first two weeks at your placement, not at the end.