ENVS 347: Environmental Storytelling (Professor Eric Kocher)

Consider opportunities like these to narrow the scope of your project (to make it manageable) and to make it important to you and to your future:

• Acquainting, or better acquainting, yourself with a particular microenvironment, ecosystem, plant or animal species, culture or place
• Giving voice to a specific environmental community, victim, need, or opportunity
• Reaching out to a scholar or research team you admire--this could entail a combination of literary review, interviews and visits (in person or virtual), and plugging yourself into a project that the scholar or team is working on
• Borrowing or tweaking an existing case study or methodology to apply to a different locality, microenvironment, or ecosystem from the original
• Updating an existing research report or case study
• Addressing a question that another researcher's work has raised or suggested for future study
• Exploring a potential path to take in life or to take vocationally?  Is there "an itch" in this regard that you really need to scratch--and sooner rather than later?
• Designing your project to help you get into certain doors--graduate school, fellowships, internships, jobs
• Narrowing the scope of your project not only to make it manageable, but also to allow yourself to dig deep
• Carrying forward a long-term project that a previous Wofford student initiated; or initiating such a project for other people, including future Wofford students, to carry on
• Weaving different interests of yours (in the sciences, arts, and humanities) or seemingly disparate threads of your life together
• Further developing certain practices, skills, or talents of yours; working on your conduct of life, your habits of heart and mind

1. What topic are you most interested in (or excited about)?

2. What do you already know about the topic and how can you build on that for your capstone?  Is there a particular aspect of the topic that you can focus on to help make your capstone manageable?

3. Keywords (including synonyms) and combinations of keywords to find information on your topic?  (Click here to enter your keywords in Wofford OneSearch.)

4. What types of resources would work best for your topic--scholarly journal articles and books; popular magazine articles and books; newspaper articles (including historical newspaper articles); case studies; interviews; eyewitness accounts; governmental reports and other agency-generated reports; creative literature (poetry, fiction, or drama); visual arts; television; film; or social media?  And do you need to find resources in any certain discipline--environmental studies, government and international affairs, psychology, sociology, education, economics, philosophy, religion, creative literature, or art?