The Capstone Program, one of Choate’s seven signature programs, provides seniors with the opportunity to work one-on-one with a faculty member to design a customized curriculum drawing on multiple classes and to create a final project of their choice. The topic of a student’s Capstone is based on their own interests, rather than a set of required classes, so the topic possibilities are endless. Marcus Ding ’22, Irene Garcia Gutierrez ’22, and Monty Singer ’22 have recently begun the process of creating their final presentations that the Choate community can look forward to in the spring.
Garcia Gutierrez, who hails from Villahermosa, Mexico, is focusing on the post-revolutionary history and economy of Mexico for her Capstone. The idea for her Capstone stemmed from the appreciation of history she gained while taking World History and U.S. History during her past two years at Choate. “I wanted to do something that would allow me to learn more about Mexico, because I felt I didn’t know much about my own country,” she said.
As a part of her project, Garcia Gutierrez is taking the Colonial Latin America, International Economics, Developmental Economics, and Political Ideologies classes. Under the guidance of her faculty adviser, Mr. Craig Johnson, she is working on writing a research paper that will detail her findings about Mexico. Through her deep dive on the country’s recent history and present economy, Garcia Gutierrez hopes to gain a better understanding of how her country’s present economic and political environment came to be.
The focus of Ding’s project is also personal identity — specifically, the identity of Asian Americans as created by society. Ding hopes to create a podcast series of around seven 20-minute episodes that provide an overview of the socially-engineered Asian American identity. Among the episode themes he is considering are the effect of World War II on the status of Japanese and Chinese Americans in the U.S., anti-Blackness within the Asian-American community, self-stereotyping, and the role of mainstream media in the proliferation of Asian stereotypes.
Ding was inspired to focus on this topic last year while taking American Studies, a class taught by his now-faculty adviser Mr. Tom White. “I can attribute it to that class that I have a greater social awareness. I spent a lot of my life running parallel courses to the Asian community, trying to fit into a certain standard,” he said. Through sharing his podcast series with the community, Ding hopes to amplify the conversation about Asian American identity. He said, “If everyone understood 1% more about their peers, the world would be a much kinder place.”
Singer is exploring the history of risk-taking for his Capstone in hopes to be better equipped for his own future adventures. Under the supervision of his faculty adviser, Mr. Jim Davidson, he will be studying varied religious perspectives on risk and the historical changes in the nature of risks through courses such as Philosophy, The American West, and Monetary Theory. He will also be focusing on space exploration, which he identified as “the next risky frontier.” He said, “We’ve covered a lot of Earth [but] we haven’t covered a lot of spatial areas.” Singer plans on compiling the information he finds from his study into three documentaries that will be available to watch on his YouTube channel come spring.
In the months ahead, these three students, along with the 33 other students pursuing Capstones, will continue to dive into their academic disciplines of choice. Stay tuned for May, when they will present their final projects — perhaps exactly as they’re thinking now, or maybe completely reimagined.
