Senior Capstone Team
"Capstone" is the senior project for all UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture &Food Systems majors
Evolution of our Project
As senior SA&FS students, we feel well-acquainted with our major. We personally understand its strengths and challenges from our individual and collective experiences. We value our major and feel invested in its success. At the beginning of our capstone project, we were a group of seven passionate individuals, eager to strengthen our major and improve the experience of incoming SA&FS students.
Throughout the project's evolution, we learned the complexity of this initiative.
Some challenges we faced include satisfying the interests of all stakeholders (clients, students, and our team), determining what power we have for influencing bureaucratic changes, and creating goals that were feasible and would result in real improvements. While there was no lack of enthusiasm for ideas for improvement, narrowing down our goals proved to be the most challenging aspect of this project, and involved lots of qualitative data collection in the form of surveys, interviews, and focus groups.
We ultimately chose to focus on enhancing the experience of the SA&FS required internship process as well as strengthening our knowledge-sharing/community support. Out of this, we developed a Peer Internship Coordinator (PIC) and a Community Supported Academics (CSA) program. We felt that putting our effort into these two initiatives would have the most beneficial impact.
As our team worked together toward these goals, we forged camraderie, respect, and a strong team dynamic that helped to propel our success. We hope our efforts result in improvements to the major that will be felt by SA&FS students to come.