UNCP 5519 Capstone: A Life Well Lived

Capstone classes may NOT be taken Pass/Fail. You may take only ONE Capstone class before graduation. Seniors only. A Capstone course, broadly speaking, is asking you to look backwards and also to look forward. In looking backwards, it is asking you to reflect on your previous formative experiences with special attention given to your years at BC. The expectation is that by doing this, you will benefit from insights about yourself (which includes insights about your academic, moral, and spiritual life), about yourself in relation to others, and about yourself in relation to different wider communities of people with which you have engaged. This kind of discernment will not only help you understand yourself better at this point in your life, but will also be of significant benefit to you as you move forward in your life. When we know how we are shaped by our past and who we are in our present, we are freer to choose the paths that will lead us to what we want our future life to be. As part of this course, we will look forward and discuss our aspirations, goals, hopes, realistic expectations, and what kind of life we may seek to live that will lead us to happiness. Since failure and loss are part of life, we will also discuss how these have affected us and how we can learn from them and move forward positively in light of them. This is a course for students who want to engage in serious reflection and in active classroom discussions of important issues in pursuing a life well lived. It is a course for students who enjoy reading and reflection. It is a course for students who enjoy participating in meaningful discussions in every class. It is a course that will allow you to focus on yourself as an individual, yourself in relation to others, and yourself and your relationship to greater circles of community. This discussion-based course deals with issues relevant to students who will be transitioning from college to the next phases of their lives. As mentioned above, this course will engage with reflecting on what has occurred in your life up to this point, and to consider what may unfold for you as you move forward. This course will be taught as a seminar. It will involve extensive reading, reflection, and classroom discussion. To benefit the most from this course and to do well in the course, you will need to be fully committed to all aspects of the course. This will include reading the material with care, reflecting on the material, being actively engaged with your classmates in meaningful conversations in every class, writing thoughtfully about the serious matters that we will be discussing, and participating in a few activities outside the classroom. Careful preparation, reflection, and participation, along with the written components and a few non-classroom activities of the course, are necessary for you to flourish in the course.