Capstone Exploration Reflection

I interviewed Tyson Tiede, a student presenting a capstone. You can download the (very low quality) audio of the interview here.
Tyson said a lot of things that I've heard a lot from many sources leading up to capstones. Notably, he talked about how the week had been pretty stressful, that getting his project done had come down to the last minute, etc. He also advised that students treat the capstone like it was "due next week." Interestingly, he said that his project ended up very similar to what he initially had in mind, which is different than what many other sources have said.

The approach of the class seemed pretty good for the most part. The gap in the second half of the semester seemed a little wasteful, especially for me since I already had a mentor and was working on the project as an independent study. I liked the student guest speakers, especially as opposed to faculty. Having faculty talk to the students could be useful, but since everyone has to have a mentor and do mentor profiles they're going to interact with the faculty anyway, so exposing them to students who recently presented capstones seems like a really good idea, and I know it was helpful for me.
The peer group assignment was useful, though it could have used a little more structure. Even though they are required outside this class anyway, I thought the proposal and timeline assignment was useful in that it ensured that students knew about those requirements and got them done. The early assignment of listing different capstone ideas seemed a bit useless to me, since I was already working on mine at the time. The same goes to a lesser degree for the mentor profiles, since I already had a mentor and a backup selected at the time.