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Hey, Marginalia Readers! It’s been a busy few weeks. Almost a month ago, the Art Education and Elementary Education MATs walked for our graduation ceremony, but we’re not finished yet!I’ve got quite the busy summer ahead of me. Between summer classes,  working on my capstone project for the MAT program, and job hunting and interviewing (hopefully securing employment very soon–fingers crossed), I feel like I’ve been working like I’m still in the thick of the spring semester. I’m struggling to manage my feelings of extreme entitlement to lie out on some beach all day and motivate myself to press through the rest of this month and finish strong. We’ve done a ton of work in this program. It’s natural to want a break, right? Maybe next month.

Ah, so what is the capstone project about, you ask? Excellent question. The capstone project for Art Education MATs is a compilation of many of the important projects we’ve done throughout the program into a book. It basically becomes a guided tour for the reader of each of our personal journeys to teacherhood, and it’s also a glimpse of how we’ve evolved from students into educators. We lay out our teaching philosophies and  classroom management plans, among other things. Much of this work we have already done, however there is a good deal of re-editing that goes into it.

Helpful tips for the capstone that I so wish someone told me at the beginning of my program:

• Keep all of your grad school work on a thumb drive.
• Organize it by class.
• Make sure the titles you save things under make sense, because it’s super easy to get lazy about small things like that.
• MAKE ANY EDITS SUGGESTED BY YOUR PROFESSOR AS YOU GET THEM!! Don’t wait until the capstone. You’ll want to cry.
• Anything you put in Livetext, also save in Word ahead of time. Preferably work on it in Word, then copy and paste it into Livetext. Livetext is secretly my nightmare. Now that I’m almost done, I can say that.

The above list is really what makes the capstone a large undertaking. For the most part it is pretty straightforward and easily done in the time frame we’ve been given. Wish me luck with finishing this and getting a job soon! Hopefully my next post will be about what I’ll be doing this fall. Hope you’re having an awesome summer so far!