Portfolio Capstone

I got here because I followed the crows.

I’d never heard that the UW had branch campuses, and I’d long ago written off the primary campus as too urban for my tastes. Then I discovered an article about the crows that returned nightly to the wetlands of UW Bothell.

The first chapter of my college experience had been tumultuous; I wasn’t at all sure that I was interested in returning to academia. And then these uncanny avians led me to UWB’s website – a website I have now helped to maintain – and introduced me to new disciplines of science, some of the most important relationships in my life, and the community that would one day help me save my family. I really think they led me home.

These are the energies, stories, and lessons that I have discovered during my time at this school.

Over the years and into the present day the many facets of creative expression have been a huge part of my life. One of my first classes at UWB was Shakespeare and Film, which definitely confirmed to me that I’d found the right place. Being invited by my professor to assist with her freshman Shakespeare class the following term only confirmed my suspicions of correctness.

I run a production company alongside a dear friend of mine, and I always keep an eye out for fellow students who might be interested in my Shakespeare in Ten program (in which we have ten days to go from auditioning to performing a full-fledged production of a Shakespeare play). These ten days are intensely challenging, but also deliriously happy; despite endless obstacles, we always pull it off in the end. For the first time this year we’re arranging not just one show for the year but four – three proper theatrical productions in addition to Shakespeare in Ten. At UW Bothell I have had the opportunity to refine my abilities in positions of artistic leadership, as well as explore the academic contexts surrounding many forms of art; I suspect this will serve me well in the years to come. This is truly my natural element, but the arts are not the only area in which creative thinking plays a pivotal role.

ARTIFACTS:

• Scenes from Macbeth (BIS 207)
• AGENCY (BIS 236)
• On the Significance of Boswells (B WRIT 134)
• “Sure Thing” by David Ives (BIS 133)
• UN_____IFIED (BISIA 483)
• Glimpsing the Garden: Perspectives on Esoteric Symbolism in the Works of Bosch (BIS 209)
• Pills (BISIA 240)

I am not a fan of math, but astronomy is a deep passion of mine. When I took a class called The Cosmos, I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to keep up as the sole IAS major in a room full of Physics kids. Nonetheless, after class on the first day I approached instructor Dr. Joey Shapiro Key and asked if – despite my lack of mathematical background – I could join her on-campus research group. Her reply was a matter-of-fact “yes,” and this was my introduction to gravitational wave astronomy.

Over the next two years I struggled with feelings of unworthiness and unintelligence compared to the other mathematically-inclined students in the group, but Dr. Key has always insistently found avenues in which my unique skills have proven useful: I have created and maintained a website for the research group, helped to create promotional and educational materials for the group and the international collaboration it’s associated with, and successfully TA’d for that same class in cosmology that started it all.

As I’ve made use of my current skills, I’ve also been working to develop new ones for the benefit of the research group. Now I have attended two physics and astronomy conferences; had a research editorial on an obscure cosmological phenomenon published in the campus research journal; found friends, confidence, and more fuel for the fire of my excitement; and am currently conducting research funded by the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium. I can be pretty stubborn in pursuit of my interests – but this stubbornness has not always been applied to such optimistic endeavors.

ARTIFACTS:

• Synopsis of ‘The End of Cosmology?’ and ‘The Quintessential Universe’ (B PHYS 305)
• Synopsis of ‘Surveying Spacetime with Supernovae’ and ‘Cosmological Antigravity’ (B PHYS 305)
• Cosmic Strings: The Cracks in the Universe (B PHYS 305)
• Searching for Cosmic Strings (B PHYS 499)

In my second year at UWB, my family and I were evicted from our apartment and became homeless. The instructor of my Interdisciplinary Inquiry class, Professor Raisa DeSmet, was the first one I approached with a hesitant but determined request for help, and she summoned the benevolent forces of the school to my aid. I don’t have the space here to recount the full story of what happened in Fall 2017, but it was without a doubt the most difficult period of my life. We came through it because of the community of UWB – from the teachers who agreed to let me work remotely as I travelled to Idaho seeking assistance, to the staff of financial aid who spent hours helping me find as much monetary support as possible, to the folks in housing who gave me a place to stay on campus once my mother had settled elsewhere.

We have since found an unprecedented stability and the future is actually bright for once; to top it all off, I made the Dean’s List during the term in which I was displaced. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this beautiful turn of fortune is only true because of the compassion of the UW community – and the nature of this human compassion is, in fact, another academic interest of mine.

ARTIFACTS:

• A Personal Narrative (BIS 300)
• Eudaemonic (BISIA 311)

There is perhaps nothing so brave as a group of students who dare to earnestly investigate the subjects that Western science has labeled as ridiculous and worthy of scorn. I’m speaking here of the Consciousness Studies minor, as well as the broader community of scholars and scientists who refuse to allow dogmatic thinking to divert the course of their curiosity. This community of researchers is unafraid to question the nature of truth and push back against the blindness of modern science.

For someone who is academically interested in the afterlife, interconnectedness, and the unexplained powers of the human mind, the specter of ridicule and professional exile is always lingering over my shoulder. In my struggle with being taken seriously by others, however, I’ve learned to take myself seriously – something which I believe to be far more valuable. I am determined to continue exploring this interest and gently challenging the status quo, and this determination is something I make use of throughout my life. I will, however, be leaving behind a place that is deeply important to me.

ARTIFACTS:

• Vacancy: On the Significance of Souls in Zombie Lore (B WRIT 135)
• Giving Up the Ghost: The Parallel Demotion of Spirits and Spirituality (BIS 268)
• ULTRA: The CIA’s Mind-Hackers (BIS 490)
• A Final Reflection (BCONSC 425)
• This House Is Clean: A Scientific History of Spiritual Cleansing Technologies in the Western Traditions (BIS 355)

I belong to my passions. I belong to this planet. I belong to my friends and my family and my intersecting communities. And I really, truly belong to this school. Over my years here I have asked, “do my disparate interests belong with each other? Do any of them belong in the ‘real world,’ where paying the bills tends to dominate all other concerns? Theater, astronomy, and the study of weird things is not exactly what most would consider the start of a moneybags career.”

But as it turns out, I don’t care. I have learned that this is what I love, and this is who I am. I will fight for the soul of science using my skills in the arts. I will fight for the well-being of my family and my entire species. And I will fight for myself and my right to be happy. And thanks to the support, the encouragement, and the beautiful culture of UW Bothell, I genuinely believe that I will succeed.

Collaboration and Shared Leadership

College wouldn’t be college without a healthy number of group projects, and the IAS learning objective (LO) Collaboration and Shared Leadership addresses the specific components of these shared undertakings. Among other things, the LO highlights that students should “pursue specific tasks without losing sense of the whole,” take into account “group members’ diverse histories, strengths, and potential contributions,” learn to “listen [and] mediate conflict,” and “[reflect] critically and creatively on collaboration processes.” As I’ll demonstrate with two pieces of evidence from the beginning and end of my UW Bothell career, my experiences at UW Bothell have left me well-versed in these objectives.

In my first term I took BIS 207 (Shakespeare & Film), an unsurprising choice given my theatrical background. For our final project, the class was divided into groups and instructed to perform a scene or selection of scenes from a Shakespearean work. My team worked on scenes from Macbeth. As half of our group members were “theater people” already we were excited to give the project our all – we decided to include a soundtrack, costumes, and choreographed stage combat, and made the decision to genderbend the characters for a new and potentially eye-opening take on the story. I played the role of Macbeth, designed the sound, and helped to choreograph the fight. My background helped me to focus on specific elements of the project while keeping the wider production in mind, and I was also able to help assess how the less theatrically-inclined folks in our group could contribute in a meaningful way to the project – just as the LO stipulates. Our final results were very well-received, and I am still in contact with one my group members regarding future theatrical collaboration.

My second artifact, the final project of BST 205 (Women in STEM) in Winter 2019, is also performative in nature; in groups, we were told to conduct research on a particular facet of the female experience in STEM fields and create a skit to perform for the class that would demonstrate what we had discovered. My group researched differences in communication for females vs. non-females in STEM work environments, writing and performing a piece called “The Self-Promoter’s Nightmare” that portrayed several versions of the same interview scenario with differently-gendered characters in each iteration. This was truly a collaborative process, in which me and my other two group members (both of whom were just as frenetically busy as I was) worked together in high-pressure circumstances to complete the necessary work and ensure that all of our ideas were honored in the final product. We also completed a post-project analysis of our dynamics working together, prompting a critical reflection on our collaborative process. This went a long way towards furthering my progress in this LO.

As both a fledgling professional and an all-around personable human being, I’m grateful to all that I have learned about collaboration and shared leadership in my time at UW Bothell.

Writing and Communication

At the core of all the artifacts presented here is a simple goal: to communicate an idea. One of the IAS learning objectives – Writing and Communication – specifically addresses this goal in its many forms, and through the classes I’ve taken at UW Bothell I feel confident in saying that I have achieved a certain level of mastery in this area. This learning objective (LO) describes “the interconnected relationships between purpose, audience, author and context,” expressing oneself through “writing, presentations, and other media,” and developing an awareness of “the ways [that] specific acts of communication relate to the work of others.” I’ve selected two examples to better highlight my most relevant efforts: one of my first assignments at UWB, and one of my last.

B WRIT 134 (Interdisciplinary Writing) wound up producing one of my favorite artifacts in this entire portfolio: “On the Significance of Boswells.” Students were instructed to take a piece of writing from one genre and re-imagine it in a different one, altering the tone and style appropriately while still retaining the original message; I took an academic essay and adapted it into a short play. The original essay discusses the character of John Watson from the Sherlock Holmes canon, defending him against various misguided renderings that portray him as a buffoonish clown. The stage adaptation features the author discussing the issue with the audience in the company of Watson and Holmes themselves. Executing this genre-bending while still keeping to the spirit of the original piece demonstrates a close understanding of audience, context, and tone, while the theatrical nature of the final product speaks to my abiding desire to express ideas in more than just written words.

Fast forward to the end of my time at UW Bothell, Spring 2019, and you’ll find me quite confident in my command of the written word as I enter BISIA 311 (Creative Writing: Prose). This class prompted a sort of identity crisis around my writing interests and abilities; I’ve always been fond of grand narrative fiction and somewhat averse to intimate memoir, but over the course of spring term I discovered that I’m actually quite competent at that more personal type of writing. This discovery was reflected in my final project, a chapbook called Eudaemonic, which contained the most personal pieces of writing I’ve ever created, much less shared. I gained an awareness of how that work related to the work of “others” – though in this case, the “other” is my past self. Having been coaxed out of my comfort zone I discovered an entirely new way to express myself, and have even had some discussion with The Stranger regarding eventual publication.

Overall, UWB has taught me a great deal about writing and communication in its many forms, and I look forward to utilizing this universally critical skillset going forward. Hopefully this essay has done more to support my claim than refute it.

Interdisciplinary Research and Inquiry

At the core of both science and the humanities is curiosity, a trait that is encouraged by the IAS learning objective (LO) of Interdisciplinary Research and Inquiry. This LO calls for students to conduct sound and well-conceived research across a broad range of fields, thinking critically and creatively to discern the parallels between seemingly disparate pieces of knowledge and to position these findings in the context of existing work and social circumstances. As a student at UW Bothell I have striven to embrace this sort of cross-discipline curiosity and become accomplished in this LO – as demonstrated by the following two pieces of evidence.

The assignment prompt I was given in Winter 2018’s BIS 268 (Problems in World History to 1500) was a vague one – write about some topic that I am “passionately interested” in and relate it in some way to pre-1500’s history. Developing a thesis based on this refreshingly open but dauntingly vague prompt was my first challenge, requiring a solid capacity to “develop research questions” and “pursue them with appropriate sources and methods,” as the LO stipulates. As evinced in my artifact archive I have a strong interest in all things strange and unusual, so I chose to focus my paper on the history of ghosts in Western society, conducting thorough research in the fields of folklore, literature, and religious studies to craft my final paper – which went on to earn publication in the university’s peer-reviewed research journal in the spring of 2019. The broad scope of sources I utilized and the confirmation that my work was well-received by its intended audience lends further credence to my claim of mastery over this LO.

Another of my large UWB research endeavors comes from outside the school of IAS, in the domain of STEM. In Spring 2017 I took B PHYS 305 (The Cosmos); after my first class I asked the professor if I could join her undergraduate research team despite my non-Physics background, and I’ve been involved with the campus’s gravitational wave astronomy research group ever since. In addition to completing work more suited to my IAS background (community outreach and education, building and maintaining the group’s website), this summer I have also received a grant from the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium to conduct scientific research on cosmic strings – a topic I had previously written my final paper on for B PHYS 305. This paper, entitled “Cosmic Strings: The Cracks in the Universe” was also published in the university’s research journal last spring. I engaged in a thorough review of existing research literatures while crafting this paper, which further demonstrates my command over the skills of this LO. Additionally, more broadly speaking, my eagerness to engage in different “kinds of inquiry” by venturing outside IAS is reflected in both this individual paper and my continued involvement in gravitational wave astronomy research.

These examples of in-depth research and cross-disciplinary practice is evidence of exactly the sort of mindset sought by the Interdisciplinary Research and Inquiry LO.

Critical and Creative Thinking

I’ve heard many people say that university is not about learning things so much as it’s about learning how to learn things. This goes hand in hand with the Critical and Creative Thinking learning objective (LO); it’s all about perspectives and analysis, asking students to identify and grapple with their own assumptions, identify the central themes of others’ work, and practice keen reasoning skills with regard to their own projects. With the aid of the following two pieces of evidence I will prove that my work over the course of my undergraduate career has made me proficient in this LO.

I’ll begin with an artifact created in B WRIT 135 (Research Writing), an early class from Spring 2017. The theme of my particular section of this required course was zombies, and unsurprisingly our final project was a research paper. The prompt for this paper asked only that our thesis have to do with zombies; the rest was up to us. I chose to research the significance of the soul in various forms of zombie lore, ranging from old Haitian legends to fictional tales to modern accountings of voodoo practices. As with any good research paper my abilities of “interpretation, analysis, argumentation, application, synthesis, evaluation, and reflection” were put to the test, but this particular project also called on me to “assess multiple perspectives” as I carried out my research: some of my sources spoke about zombies as only intriguing literary motifs, while others discussed with absolute sincerity the religious reality of their existence. Keeping these disparate viewpoints in mind while gleaning the key messages of each source led to a comprehensive paper I am still quite pleased with – and furthered my progress towards mastering this LO.

Things got considerably more personal two years later in Spring 2019, when I began work on my final project for BISMCS 343 (Media Production Workshop: Documentary Photography). We were tasked with creating a photo-essay (a short series of candid still images) that spoke to a current, local issue of our choosing. I had just the topic in mind, but it called for a bit of emotional reckoning: a small alliance of local businesses called Bothell Country Village, where I had previously worked at a coffee shop, had been sold and auctioned off to a developer, forcing local artisans and merchants out in favor of condominiums. I’d been devastated to hear the news, and when I found out that its last week standing fell just before my project deadline, I knew I’d found my topic. Taking pictures of the deserted storefronts forced me to “engage with controversy productively” and made clear to me the reality of my “own social positions” as a local arts practitioner; this sort of economic competition is something I will likely come to grapple with as I continue to operate a small theatrical production company.

These projects and many more gave me valuable practice in my critical and creative thinking skills, leaving me well-versed in the requirements of this LO.

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“From the Frontlines of the Merry War”

Essay written for BIS 207, Shakespeare & Film. Professor Louise Spiegler. Fall 2016.

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