Sandra Avery Monroe Capstone

Abstract:

Over the past 4 years, I feel like I haven’t really taken the time to get know each and every person at the school, and I still don’t know every person. This year, I wanted to make an effort to get to know new people and talk to them. I also wanted to show people who all of the different students at SLA  are and how they make the community the way it is now. SLA is such a diverse school in so many different ways. We have people from all different neighborhoods, cultures, races and ethnicities. There are also so many different people with different personalities that it made it very interesting to hear about them and then to put a face to those pictures.

With the help of Myrna Yousuf and Ms. Giknis, we created a blog where we interviewed students, teachers, and even a few visitors in the school. We wanted to get a chance to talk to them. The outcomes were different depending on who we talked to. We got some funny stories, some sad stories, some random stores. All of it put together created an awesome, diverse page. By myself, I created a magazine where I had a couple of people write poems and articles about being human and being a human of SLA. Myrna and I had the chance to collaborate with so many really interesting people to create a diverse experience and blog throughout our senior year of high school.

Here is the link for my magazine: http://joom.ag/9gYQ
Here is the link to our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/humansofsla/


Annotated Bibliography:

  1. Benaroya, Ana. Illustration Next: Contemporary Creative Collaboration. Thames & Hudson. Print. This source provided me with a couple of questions that could be used in interviews with different students. I selected this source because as I looked through it, I really liked the questions that they asked. There were about 6 questions that were asked to every artist in the book. I thought it was very interesting to see the responses that the interviewer would get. I wanted to know how the students at SLA would respond to those questions and how similar they were to the answers I was seeing in the book. I found this source useful because at times I was stuck with what to ask people and I stumbled upon this book and I really liked what I was seeing. One limitation to this book was that some of the questions couldn’t really be applied to the real world and many of them were too broad.


  1. Carrier, Nicole. "Four Ways To Get People's Attention Online." Forbes. Forbes Magazine. Web. 04 Feb. 2016. This information was helpful for what I am going to do with both the HumansofSLA pages and also the magazine that will be created. This was helpful because often times it is very difficult to get people to pay attention to what you want them to pay attention to. This gave me good pointers for that problem. I selected this because as soon as I saw the first suggestion, I knew that is what I wanted to do with this entire project and that it would have more great information. I think the only flaw with this site was that there wasn’t more information about how to catch attention.


  1. Isreal, Shel. "9 Tips on Conducting Great Interviews." Forbes. Forbes Magazine. Web. 10 Jan. 2016.As soon as I saw this source, I knew that it would be very helpful and very reliable. The source provided me with a lot of great tips and pointers on how to conduct an interview. There was information on what types of questions to ask, and information on how to make sure it was a comfortable and personable situation. I thought it was helpful to have all of this information on how to be successful when interviewing somebody, especially if it is somebody that I don’t know. I selected this source because it was one of the first and best sources I found when looking for information on conducting a successful interview.


  1. Kotter, John. "The Power Of Stories." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 12 Apr. 2006. Web. 20 Nov. 2015. This source was a very interesting read for me. This made me want to get more stories from people that were at my school and hear about what they have to say. I think that through doing this, I have learned so much about people. I have learned and changed from doing this project and that is what the article talks about. I used this source because it showed me how important this could be to me and the other people that are reading the stories. I like that this source showed what happened when people didn’t tell stories and how it wasn’t as effective. I also like how they showed what it was like when there were stories told in places instead of just people talking at you with a presentation.


  1. Kuhel, Beth. "The Secret to a Successful Interview: Great Storytelling." US News RSS. 17 Apr. 2014. Web. 04 Nov. 2015. I used this website because it gave me information on interviews but then it also gave me a lot of information on how to put that into storytelling. This website helped me think of what would be helpful to get a good interview started. This helped me generate questions, even if I didn’t know the person. I selected this source because I felt that when I was brainstorming how to create a good interview this helped me a lot. It made it easier for me to make it a very personal experience for me and for the person that is being interviewed. This source helped me create a good flow for my interviews.


  1. Parr, Ben. "7 Ways to Capture Someone's Attention." Harvard Business Review. 03 Mar. 2015. Web. 04 Feb. 2016. For one of the parts of my capstone, I am going to be creating an online magazine for people to look at and they will be able to submit different pieces for my magazine. This website was helpful because it helped me see what I can do to make the website more appealing to people who will be viewing it. I found this source useful because it was a good starting point on what I could do to make my website more attractive. I think that this source could have been a little more helpful if it had been more focused towards grabbing attention on a magazine.



  1. Resorts, Wynn. "The Power of Storytelling." The Power of Storytelling. Web. 01 Feb. 2016. This is an entire website that focuses on telling stories and how powerful they can be to people. This motivated me to find better questions, and I also liked to see how helpful stories could be to people. One part that I found particularly helpful was when they talked about how people use stories to make sense of different things that they have seen because of the lens that they look through. I liked this because I see this a lot when I am doing interviews, and it was interesting to see this in a business.

  2. Stanton, Brandon. Humans of New York: Stories. St. Martins, 2015. Print.My entire capstone was based off of this website and book. We saw this website and were very inspired to create our own version of it. It was helpful to have something so similar to base our work off of. We selected this source because it was very interesting and we liked the idea of implementing this into our own school. This source really laid out everything that we wanted to do. Even if ours wasn’t going to look the exact same way. Through this source, we could look at how the pictures were taken, and try and backtrack to see what types of questions were being asked to the people he was talking to.

  3. Wolfe, K., J. Carroll, and T. Bush. "Tips for a Successful Interview - 9.151 - Colorado State University Extension." Colorado State University Extension. Web. 15 Jan. 2016. This website was helpful for both conducting an interview and also being interviewed. I used it to give me information on this because at first, even though I knew how to do both of those, I needed the extra information just so that I could make sure I was being professional. The only flaw with this website was that since I didn’t know all of these people, I couldn’t always be prepared for the person. I wish they had pointers on what to do if you are interviewing somebody you don’t know.

  4. "Fun Photos: A Look at What Participants Bring to the Booth." StoryCorps. Web. 04 Feb. 2016. This website was very helpful because with this, I could see the types of pictures that I could take to really represent people. I had other websites like this, but I liked this one a lot because it was a similar type of thing to what I was doing. I think that a flaw with this was that with these they didn’t really have stories with the pictures so even though you saw an interesting picture of someone, you couldn’t really get a story about them. I did like this website as a whole though because they had a lot of different stories on them and that was the whole thing that they did on the website.

  5. "The Octoroon - The Broadview Anthology of British Literature." The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 May 2016.

For one of the people that wrote an essay for me, they talked about this play, so I wanted to get some photos so that there was a visual of the play that was being talked about.

  1. "The Octoroon: A Play, in Four Acts." Louisiana Anthology. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 May 2016.

This was another picture that I used that had to do with the play.

  1. Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden. "The Wilma Theater: An Octoroon [03/16/16]." The Wilma Theater: An Octoroon [03/16/16]. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 May 2016.

This photo has to do with the more modern version of the play that was being talked about. The person that wrote about it, wrote about this version so I had a picture of this and also of the older version.

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