The most critical component to a successful capstone project is having an enthusiastic and engaged Community Partner. The spirit of this project is to advance energy and/or sustainability-related initiatives in your own community while affording you the opportunity to network in your own backyard. Your partnership could be with a non-profit organization, local business owner, or government entity. You'll work with them to establish or advance some energy and/or sustainability related initiative with policy implications (either at the local level or within their organization). Because this partnership will be central to your experience in the capstone semester, we need to establish it early so that you and your partner can then start solidifying the work you'll do for them during the semester itself.

EME 466 Enrollment Approval Process

1. Contact your academic adviser to confirm that you are eligible to take EME 466. As the capstone course, it should be taken in your last semester and before (not concurrent with) its stated prerequisite courses (GEOG 30N, CAS 100, and GEOG 432).
2. Review the Capstone Project Overview as well as other associated components of the project noted on this course website.
3. Connect with prospective Community Partners in your town to identify possible opportunities for partnership. The starting point is a community partner you want to work with (and who wants to work with you) and a topic of interest and value to them. We’re trying to advance something they’re already interested in and possibly invested in but perhaps don’t have the staff resources to work on right now while providing you with a good networking opportunity right in your own backyard.
4. Decide with your chosen Community Partner: (1) the scope of work you'll be doing for them over the course of a semester and (2) the types of deliverables your work will produce for them.
5. Submit your draft project scope and deliverables to the instructor for consideration and revision. Note, it's often the case the Community Partner plays a continued role in this piece as we refine the project.
6. The EME 466 instructor and the student will work to refine the project so it's an appropirate amount and level of work for an undergraduate capstone.
7. The EME 466 instructor approves the project.
8. The student provides a Project Agreement to the Community Partner for signature.
9. Once the Project Agreement is fully executed (student, instructor, Community Partner), the instructor will register the student for the course.
10. The instructor will reach out to everyone to set up a kickff call for the first week of the semester.

Deadlines:

To be considered for enrollment in the course, you must have submitted a potential project scope with deliverables for a prospective partner you've already approached by the following dates:

• October 15 for spring semester enrollment
• July 15 for fall semester enrollment
• April 15 for summer semester enrollment (note: the capstone is not always offered in summer semesters)

Shared with permission of the students and their community partners, here are some examples from recent capstone projects.  Check out some of the innovative and important work your classmates have done as you try to think about what you might want to do in your own community.

Spring 2025

Fall 2024

Summer 2024

• Eric Holz - Cultivating Change: Advancing Sustainability Initiatives of Pacific Quest
• Calvin Lee - Advancing Solar Energy Implementation in Conshohocken Borough

Spring 2024

• Katie Cloud - Sustainability and Dorsett Shoals Baptist Church: A Breakdown of Funding Opportunities, Sustainable Actions, and Community Engagement
• Karrie Goudy - An Analysis of the Impacts of Human Population Density and a Changing Climate on Native Wildlife in South Central PA
• Julia Ortiz - Finding Funding and Sourcing Sponsors for a Permanent Food Scrap Collection Program in State College, PA

Fall 2023

• Shaun Cerborino - Zoned Out:  Philadelphia Zoning Code and the Philly Tree Plan
• MIke Dabulas - A Sustainable Fanwood
• Louis DeCordova - Shiomida Community Disaster Management and Response Report
• Shana Murphy - Centre Region Food Scraps Drop-off Pilot Project
• JungHyun Ro - The Korean Government's Decarbonization Bills and Small Businesses

Summer 2023

• Heather Lewis - An Assessment of Tree Ordinancs in Columbia County, Georgia
• Hadyn Moore - 2023 Carlisle SynTec Recycling Revamp

Spring 2023

• Maya Thomas - Expansion of Residential Solar in and Around Chicago, IL for Freedom Solar Power
• Deb Kimball - Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center Permitting Support
• Morgan Miller - Building Retrofitting and Climate Migration Policies in State College, PA
• Daniel Parker - Energy & Water Conservation Opportunities for the Korean Eunkang Church of Ogden, Kansas
• Kayla Peate - A Sustainable Winery: Inventory of Emissions, Carbon Sinks, Possible Improvements and Smart Land Use Policy

Fall 2022

• Haley Amundsen - Link Up Illinois and the Olde Schaumburg Centre Farmers Market: Evaluating the Cost Benefit Analysis of Implementing Sustainable Food Assistance Programs in Chicagoland
• Sean Collins - Sustainability Recommendations for 825 Tech Drive in the City of Gahanna, CO
• Jarrad Garis - Energy Efficiency Upgrades for the New Creations United Methodist Church, Chesapeake, VA
• Jeremiah Garrick - Turf Replacement in Englewood, CO
• Lauren Larko - Analysis of Illegal Dumping for Allegheny Cleanways
• Melissa Lopez  - North Branch Land Trust Land Quality Analysis
• Leigh Puchalski - Sustainability and the Raymond Farm Center
• Taylor Quaid - Swatara Creek Riparian Buffer Repairment Project
• Kate Robeson-Grubb - Paper & Plastic Product Usage by a Small Research Firm in the PA Bucks-Mont Area
• Alex Swithers - Fire Management Methods: An Economic Assessment of Hazardous Fuel Load Management Methods

This project represents the culminating experience of your time as an ESP student. As such, it should pull together the wide array of knowledge you've learned and apply the skills you've refined in a practical scenario in the real world. We're going to be venturing out from behind your computers this semester to have a tangible impact in your community. In this inquiry-based project, you'll tackle the wicked problems of sustainability you see and experience in your own community (or workplace, perhaps). You will identify, organize, execute, and reflect on a local issue related to energy, the environment or sustainability more broadly with particular emphasis on policy-based solutions.

Project Learning Outcomes:

1. Apply the knowledge you've acquired over the course of your degree to a local sustainability problem in your own community.
2. Approach, engage, and collaborate with community partners, subject matter experts, and citizens to better understand the problem and its challenges and the opportunities you have to address them.
3. Develop and present a thoroughly researched, feasible solution to the problem while providing clear identification of the next steps and areas for further inquiry based on your project's scope.

Challenges to Consider:

• You'll be managing competing perspectives through diverse stakeholders on potentially contentious issues.
• You'll need to adapt to unintended consequences of policy decisions and navigate around roadblocks as they emerge.
• You'll address distant drivers of change at a variety of scales - recognizing the potential for cascading effects from international and national level decisions at the municipal or organizational level.
• Timing is everything - there may be forces beyond your control that prevent you from submitting your project-related deliverables on time but you are responsible for communicating any speed bumps in advance.

Project Deliverables:

As you can see, the project components themselves constitute the majority of your grade.

Weekly Journaling to Organize, to Experience, and to Reflect Upon Your Project

As you move through this project, you will be actively exploring new territory, interacting with others outside of Penn State and taking on new challenges. Your project will be an experience and keeping this weekly journal will help you reflect on these experiences and learn from them along the way.  Please use the required templated provided in Canvas to complete your journal entries.

• This Week's Accomplishments.  Chronicle your project activities and observations for the week to help stay organized. From a personal perspective, talk about new contacts, interesting tidbits, planned visits, press coverage related to the topic or event, things you are excited…or concerned…about, new questions that have arisen, something you had misunderstood but now have right, areas where you are stuck (need help, info or questions answered) and your overall progress on the project (on track, behind, ahead). Think about this component of the journal entry as a running to do (and done!) list.
  • Tasks completed; progress made
  • New questions, inconsistences, or assumptions that you may be rethinking
  • Feelings about the project's progress and status
  • deliverables for the coming week
     
• Additional Issues to Consider.  Experience your project fully. Go beyond the surface facts—invite yourself to think, feel, raise questions, make connections and have new ideas. As you write, step back and think beyond the summarizing of your concrete accomplishments of the week.  What does this relationship with your Community Partner mean to you?  Are you learning something that challenges the notions you entered the project with?  What's most exciting to you about your project right now?  What scares you the most?
  • New directions or conclusions
  • Connections with material you've learned in other courses
  • New technical or logistical considerations for the project
  • Connections to stakeholders, your Community Partner, or others
     
• Bigger Project Picture. As you think about what you've done this week and what you need to do in the coming week and you situate that in any additional issues to consider, reflect on what this might mean bigger picture.
  • Detail the tasks you'll complete in the coming week.
  • How does this connect to or deviate from prior knowledge you have?
  • What more do you need to understand to complete your tasks ahead?
  • What are your ongoing experiences with your Community Partner teaching you?

As you write each journal entry, here are some tips for opening up this space and learning from the experience of your project. These areas must be addressed in each journal entry and will obviously vary in length and scope from week to week as your project evolves. As this is a journaling exercise, please feel free to be open and at ease in these communications. They will have a necessary conversational tone and structure and should definitely be written from the first person perspective. The nature of the project is also such that it is likely that some weeks the journaling will focus more on things that needed to be accomplished but weren't yet (and why that's the case).

Formatting

Use the required template available in Canvas.

How long should a journal entry be? The length may vary from week to week, but a typical journal entry should be approximately 500 words of narrative and then the schedule table.

Note: Only to be completed as a graded assignment while enrolled in the course! This is *not* part of the application process to be considered for enrollment into EME 466. This document will live within your final digital story, and may be something you share with your Community Partner or others you work with along the way this semester. Let's make it sharp!

Requirements

Use subheads as shown to identify each section of your work.

While each student's project will inherently be quite different, there are some standard guidelines for us to follow to ensure that expectations are met for the scope and rigor of the work you will undertake this semester. The Project Agreement is an informal contract of sorts between the three parties (Instructor, Student, and Community Partner). Students must scope their project, provide proposed deliverables, and secure their Community Partner's signature before the instructor will enroll them in the course.

To obtain a copy of the project agreement, your scope of work and list of deliverables must first be approved. Contact the course instructor for details.

Contextualizing Your Project in Established Literature

You will now conduct a short but detailed research paper on your topic. Think of this as a literature review to help you fully understand the first two points below and then discuss the third, which is where your work comes in.  This assignment is both your necessary background preparation to work on your topic and your justification for why your project matters.

1. What are some of the root causes of the challenge you're addressing in your project? You'll want to look critically for economic, social, political, geographic, and institutional barriers or conditions that have created the environment in which your problem emerged and exists.
    
2. What are the existing and attempted policy measures to address this issue both in your own community and in peer communities?
    
3. Gaps (this is where it gets fun!) - After reviewing previous attempts to address the problem and understanding better where it comes from, what gaps in the literature do you see. Hint: A gap in the literature is usually where you want to fit your own work in - you're going to help fill the gap.

You need to be knowledgeable on this subject matter to affect real change. It's critically important that you don't go in presenting possible solutions that have been attempted and failed, or aren't feasible for any number of reasons. To ensure you develop credibility and respect with your Community Partner and other relevant stakeholders, you must be knowledgeable.

Submission Guidelines

• 5 pages of 11 or 12 pt font, single-spaced (approximately 2500 words, not including reference pages)
• appropriately and consistently attributed in correctly formatted in a citation style of your choosing
• well-written, thoroughly edited, organized discussion
• must contain at least 15 unique sources (all cited within the body of the submission)

Want to know more?

Here are some resources for learning more about how to conduct and structure your literature review.

• Penn State Graduate Writing Center - Writing Literature Reviews
• University of Toronto - The Literature Review: A Few Tips on Conducting It
• UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center - Literature Reviews

When drafting the Project Agreement, we determined and then agreed upon the types of deliverables you would provide to your Community Partner as tangible artifacts of your work this semester. These deliverables will be submitted and reviewed by the Instructor at least twice this semester:

1. Draft Community Partner Deliverables - in Unit 3, students will submit their deliverable drafts to the instructor for feedback. The draft submission is an opportunity for the instructor and student to touch base about the tangible progress of the project beyond the weekly journaling assignments. Students are expected at this stage to have many of their deliverables well under way. Students may be waiting on additional data or input from Community Partners or other stakeholders to move forward, but the draft submission should clearly demonstrate that the project is nearing completion.
   
2. Final Capstone Portfolio - in Unit 4, students will submit, as part of their final portfolio, the final copy of all deliverables provided to the Community Partner.  This submission will be an Adobe Spark Digital Story that will link out to all associated documents.

The timing of your project (and therefore the subsequent development of these deliverables) might unavoidably conflict with the course deadline structure. If so, talk to your instructor about alternative arrangements. Flexibility is fine, but only if it's approved in advance.

Examples of Deliverables:

Remember, the overarching goal of these projects is to provide our Community Partners with information that advances their goals and is of the most use to them. To that end, we need to let them help guide what the deliverable structure will look like. Aside from a presentation, which is a required component of every project, each student's project will take on its own shape and structure. Here is a list of possible (perhaps even likely) types of deliverables you'll want to consider providing to your Community Partner (or, that your Community Partner may specifically ask of you). Thinking of something not on this list? Let's talk about it!

• written report documenting your work and recommendations
• other artifacts of the work you complete such as brochures, flyers, posters, or infographics
• policy memo
• resolution
• guidance document for carrying the project forward after the end of the semester
• website
• story map
• digital story
• training manual

Soon you'll venture 'into the wild' to present your findings and recommendations to your Community Partner and perhaps some citizens or other stakeholders. This is exciting! And maybe a little scary.

One of the Program Competencies ESP seeks to emphasize is strong communication skills - both oral and written. We have many opportunities to demonstrate the written communication skills, but fewer for oral communication. You are required to present your capstone project to your Community Partner in some capacity as a deliverable for this course. Before that, though, we will run through that presentation together as a Zoom rehearsal. This is an opportunity for us to think about the story of your project and how you tell that story to your Community Partner. We'll go through your slides and try to anticipate and prepare proactively for the questions they're likely to have.

How this works

• Upload your PowerPoint file to the Canvas Presentation Rehearsal assignment *before* your scheduled presentation. Shortly before the schedule presentation time begins, the instructor will enable screen sharing and hosting capabilities for you within Zoom and you'll be able to give the presentation from there.
• Give the presentation as if you're giving it to your Community Partner. This means you don't need to backfill a lot of background information for the instructor's benefit that the Community Partner would clearly know.
• Think of this as a draft that will inevitably undergo revision after our session.

Grading

• Quality (25%) - First and foremost, we'll make sure that the presentation you're about to give is factually accurate and robust. Your presentation should demonstrate this through thoroughly supported facts and figures as well as your accurate descriptions of data and honest representations of stakeholder positions.
• Engaging delivery (25%) - It's important to engage your audience and maintain their attention. This includes thoughtfully designed slides, well-positioned transitions between topics, and a dynamic oral delivery (very important!).
• Completeness (25%) - While there may be some minor details to which you must attend, the presentation as given in the rehearsal should very closely mirror your intended presentation for your in-person event.
• Design aesthetic (25%) - slide deck follows recommendations for building an effective presentation provided in the assignment.

Building an Effective Presentation

• use bulleted phrases, not complete sentences - you don't want to tempt yourself to read from your slides, they are just there to keep the conversation on task
• create a visually interesting but not distracting presentation look and feel - PowerPoint has many attractive themes from which to choose
• avoid text in bright colors like red, bright blue, or neon green - opt instead for black or dark gray or dark blue on a light background, or white or light gray on a dark background
• use images and graphics, but only as appropriate, not just as filler
• assume you'll spend 2-3 minutes per slide

The goal of this assignment is to succinctly package your semester's worth of work into a compact, professionally attractive artifact that outlives the confines of our class together. This can be something you share with your community partner, prospective employers during interviews, and more. You've worked really hard this semester, and now it's time to tell the story of what you've learned and why it matters.

Adobe Spark Webpage with accompanying 1-3 minute video:

• Webpage: provide an introduction of the project itself (1-2 paragraphs), include links to all associated content and resources from the project and class (lit review, works cited, deliverables for partner, etc.), embed 1-3 minute Spark video
• Video: embedded within the webpage, 1-3 minutes in length, narrated, discusses the story of the project (introduction to the Community Partner and the challenge you worked on as well as your findings/results and thoughts on expanding the work in the future (either for the partner themselves or more broadly in other areas or places)

Resources:

• The EMS Digital Stories in Science site - they break down the process of how to approach an assignment like this in ways that might be useful to you
• Example Sparks from the SP 2021 EME 466 semester:
  • Joyce Arpon – Penn State Dining Halls Foodprint
  • Tom Killian – Rooftop solar for a navy yard
  • Hibba Stanley – Commercial energy efficiency analysis
  • Robert Trimble – Increasing sustainability at a local salon
  • Kellan Turner – transitioning from gas to electric chainsaws for a tree service business

Remember, this is a relatively new assignment using technology we've not previously dug into in this class. I'm excited to see what you've come up with and am trying to give you both a lot of latitude for creativity while also providing some structure so you have an idea of where to go.