Your 90-Second Pitch — Prep Sheet
Field Experience Capstone · the Black Box stage, Fine Arts Center
At the capstone you deliver one minute and thirty seconds on yourself and your Field Experience. Fully prepared, live, on a real stage, to a real audience. No prompt to react to, no questions to survive — just your 90 seconds, done well.
That's a shorter time than you think, and the students who do it well are the ones who decided in advance exactly what they wanted to say. This sheet is how you decide. Work through the prompts, write down whatever comes, then pick your strongest material and build the pitch out of it.
You are not summarizing a class. You are telling a room full of adults — employers, administrators, families, community members, maybe your own supervisor — what this experience did to you and where it's pointing you next.
Two things have to come through in 90 seconds, and everything on this sheet exists to help you find them:
1. Why this experience mattered. Not "it was a great opportunity." What specifically changed because you did it — something you can now do, understand, or handle that you couldn't in August.
2. How it's shaping your path. Confirmed a direction, changed one, closed a door, opened one you didn't know existed. All four of those are good answers. "I found out this isn't for me" is one of the most valuable outcomes this course produces — and it takes more honesty to say out loud than a comfortable answer does.
Read every prompt. Answer the ones that spark something. You will not use all of this material in your pitch — 90 seconds is roughly 200–230 words, so you'll use maybe three or four of these answers total. The point of going through all of them is to find your best three or four instead of settling for the first ones you thought of.
Write in fragments. Nobody grades this sheet.
Build it in four pieces
A 90-second pitch has roughly this shape. The timings are a guide, not a rule — but if any one piece runs much past its share, the others get squeezed out.
- Where did you spend your semester, and what does that organization actually do? (one sentence a stranger would understand)
- What was your role called — and if it didn't have a title, what would you call it?
- How would you describe your placement to someone who has never heard of it?
- What did you do on a normal day? Walk through it start to finish.
- What's one task you owned — something that was yours, not something you watched?
- What did you get trusted with by the end that you weren't trusted with at the start?
- Did you make, build, fix, write, or organize anything? What was it?
- What's the hardest thing you were asked to do?
- Was there a moment someone relied on you? What happened?
- If your supervisor described your contribution in one sentence, what would they say?
- What can you do now that you couldn't do in August?
- What surprised you about this work? What did you expect that turned out to be wrong?
- What was the hardest day, and what did you do about it?
- Tell me about a mistake. What did you learn from it? (This is the single strongest thing you can put in a pitch. Adults trust people who can name their own mistakes.)
- Who taught you something there — and what was it?
- What's something small you now understand about how a real workplace functions?
- Which of the 10 employability skills grew the most? Where's your proof?
- Look back at your pre-assessment and your weekly reflections. What's the gap between the person who wrote those and you now?
- Did this confirm what you want to do, or change it?
- What's your next step — a program, a major, a certification, a job, more of this same work?
- Did this close a door for you? (Finding out a field isn't right is a real, useful result. Say it plainly and say why.)
- Did it open one you didn't know existed?
- What would you tell a student considering this placement next year?
- What do you want to be able to do five years from now that this got you closer to?
- What's the one thing you're taking with you no matter where you end up?
What 90 seconds sounds like
One example, roughly 215 words. Notice how little of it is about the organization and how much is about the student.
"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 running the sterilization cycle on surgical instruments. By November I was trusted to walk new clients through post-surgery care instructions on my own — which meant a stranger was taking medical direction from a seventeen-year-old, and I had to actually know what I was talking about.
The thing that changed me was a day I got a dosage question wrong in front of a vet tech. She corrected me in about four seconds and moved on, and I realized nobody there was going to be gentle with me — not because they were mean, but because the animal mattered more than my feelings. After that I started writing everything down and asking questions before I acted instead of after.
Going in, I thought I wanted human medicine. Now I'm looking hard at veterinary school, and I'm applying to shadow at an emergency clinic this summer. I came in thinking this semester would confirm a plan. It replaced it with a better one."
Now draft it
Go back through your notes, star your three or four strongest answers, and write the pitch here. Aim for 200–230 words — that's 90 seconds at a natural speaking pace. Write it how you'd say it, not how you'd write an essay.
Practice it properly
Reading it silently is not practicing. Work this list and the stage stops being scary.
- Describing the organization instead of yourself. The audience came to hear about you. Two sentences of context is plenty.
- "I learned a lot" with nothing behind it. Every student says this. Replace it with the specific thing you learned.
- Reading from your phone. It costs you eye contact, which is most of what people judge you on.
- Listing everything. Five vague tasks are weaker than one described well. Trust the one.
- Running out of time before your ending. The last 15 seconds are the ones that stay with people. Protect them by cutting from the middle.
You have written more about this semester than you remember. Go read it before you decide you have nothing to say:
- Your weekly reflections — fifteen weeks of specifics you've already forgotten. This is the single best source.
- Your pre- and post-assessments — the actual measured difference in your 10 employability skills.
- Your Internship Plan of Success and your Launch Card — the goals you set in August. Did you hit them? That's a pitch line either way.
- Your timesheet task notes — a plain record of what you actually did, week by week.
- Your portfolio artifacts — if a piece is worth putting on your table, it's worth 10 seconds in your pitch.
Same four pieces, same 90 seconds. Two shifts: in part 2, "what you did" is what you built — the business, the client work, the product — and in part 4, your next step is what happens to that venture after this year. If you had paying clients or real audience numbers, say so plainly. Outcomes are your advantage; use them.
Related: Capstone Details · How the Pitch Is Scored · Portfolio Guide · Weekly Reflection