SPAN 300
Course description: Directed toward Spanish majors preparing for their Capstone experience, this course aims to guide the student in the process of completing a capstone proposal and initiating the preliminary steps toward the graduation ePortfolio. The ePortfolio provides evidence that a student is making satisfactory progress toward meeting the Core requirements and Major Learning Outcomes (MLOs) for the Spanish B.A.
Meets MLO 6
This course is related to WLC 400
Meets MLO 6
This course is related to WLC 400
Reflective Narrative
In SPAN 300, my research skills improved a lot thanks to all the preparation and resources I received in this course. Being the introductory course for my capstone project, at first, I had many fears and doubts as it was a very important project, however, throughout the semester, Dr. Rebecca Pozzi guided me and my partner Fátima Andrade in the early stages of our capstone. The most difficult part of this project was choosing the novels that were going to be analyzed, as well as the approach we wanted to carry out. As we both consider ourselves arduous feminists and lovers of Mexican literature, we wanted our capstone to be related to these aspects. For this reason, we decided to analyze Hurricane Season (2017) by Fernanda Melchor, a Mexican writer who has a very crude way of writing about Mexican pain and violence. The challenge came later when we had to find a novel that could match Hurricane Season, due to the themes the novel deals with and how Melchor develops them. Our first options were novels that dealt with prostitution or abortion, as well as machismo in love relationships, as can be seen in our proposals document, but nothing convinced us completely. We started to get a little anxious, considering changing our focus from the capstone, but thanks to the support and advice of our professor Dr. Pozzi and our advisor Dr. Carolyn González, in addition to the course resources, we came to the conclusion to choose another novel from the same author, Paradais (2021). In this way, we had our focus well established with these two novels and we were very excited to start the project. Thanks to this course, I learned about the initial research process, and I was given many tools to start structuring my project. From now on I will apply everything I learned to carry out future research projects. I also received assistance with the content of my e-portfolio, making sure everything was complete and ready to be published. The only thing I would like to improve is my organization to meet the deadlines, although I always meet them, sometimes I leave things until the last minute. I hope the experience I gain doing this capstone will help me change this aspect about me.