Capstone, Capstone, Capstone
The time has come, Capstone season! From February to April I focused on a capstone project for my experiential French class. The capstone project is one of the most highly anticipated projects of the year. As long as your topic gets approved, the project can be on any subject of your choosing, as long as it’s place based in Rennes. My topic was the local Rennes-based newspaper, Ouest-France. I chose Ouest-France because I’m interested in journalism and the process of newspaper printing, plus this widely known newspaper was developed right in my home of Rennes.
I revolved my project around two essential questions: How does Ouest-France prosper or resist despite the competition of other news sources? and How has Ouest-France changed with technology?
The purpose of the capstone is to go out and explore! We interviewed locals, visited locations specific to our topic, and documented our experience through a journal. While content of your research was important, the main objective was to create new experiences through discovering your topic and becoming an expert at it!
For my project, I interviewed a journalist, an economist, and I visited the Ouest-France newspaper factory. My favorite part of the project was the factory tour because it was my first time ever visiting a factory, and seeing the production of the daily papers was eye-opening to how many copies are printed and sold each day (over 600,000!). Not only did I have the opportunity to see how each newspaper is printed, but I visited the redaction office as well, something inspiring since journalism is a career I would love to pursue in the future! Watching journalists make edits to their articles in real time was fascinating. Also, one journalists was working on four screens at a time, oh the dream to not have to switch tabs😅.
With all of my research notes and interview notes I gathered from the two months of work, I prepared a 10 minute presentation. Since I could talk about this topic for hours with all the information I’ve learned, it was hard to minimize the experience into just 10 minutes. Wanting to speak longer than the presenting time is something I never envisioned for myself but look how far we've come! Did I also mention that this presentation is all in French, no speaker notes allowed. Along with my presentation I created a short video of a tour of the Ouest-France factory so that my classmates could visualize my explanations and see the inside of the factory!
Because this project is the most prominent project of the year, the teachers engraved the importance of this presentation leading up to Capstone day. This gave me some nerves in the first minute of my presentation, but by the middle I was speaking in French so fluently without any stutters, I surprised myself with what I was saying! This was one of those “yes I’m finally speaking French!” moments. Of course I’ve been speaking French all year, but there are always words I want to say but only know in English, incorrect verb tenses, or simple vocabulary. My capstone presentation was one of those moments when I felt confident in what I was saying as well as knowing others understood what I was saying as well!
Overall, I really enjoyed my capstone project since it was informative and a topic I personally enjoyed! There’s a large difference between a research project and an immersive project, and this was my first time experiencing an immersive project. This project has not only opened my eyes on the newspaper Ouest-France, but communication, production, and of course, more French!
