For my capstone I created a website that can be used by students of SLA and other Philadelphia schools to help find internship and volunteering opportunities across the city. My website has 30 different internships, a section explaining the importance of internships and a place where you can submit any other internship you have interest in doing. To complete this I used Wix to create the website and conducted my own research on why internships are important. In addition to researching why internships are important I also researched where to find internships in the Philadelphia area. I decided to do this for my capstone because I never got a chance to have an internship in my time at SLA and I think that they can be really beneficial for a student’s growth into a working person. I enjoyed this challenge because I got to apply information that I learned through SLA while also learning a new thing like website building.

Link to Website: https://ohyland23.wixsite.com/slainternships

Link to Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1StFCD-ijbm1PnXGe0mavbF7ZtM4Al_7P1X-ljiTeiK8/edit?usp=sharing

Oisin Hyland Dec 8, 2022 Giknis

In “The Road”, the author, Cormac McCarthy does not often go into the specifics of things. Roads, cities, brands, and even people remain nameless over the course of the story, sometimes making it difficult to follow along. From the very start of the story, McCarthy uses “the man” and “the boy” to address his main characters. The only time specific terms are used is when they find the Coca-Cola and the introduction of Ely, no road, city or person is named other than that. In my drawing I decided to highlight McCarthy’s austere form of writing by keeping the characters and their surroundings simple. In addition to McCarthy’s lack of specifics in the story, I also wanted to highlight how important the boy is to his father. Even though the man is older and has obviously lived in this world longer than the boy, on multiple occasions throughout “The Road” the boy is often there to lead his father. The boys development as a character from the first page is evident due to how much maturing he has to do because of his surroundings. The post-apocolyptic world that he has been faced with has made him grow up much faster than he should have. This is most evident when you ook at how many questions the boy was asking in the beginning of the story compared to that of the end. I chose to highlight this by drawing the boy in more color to symolise how important the boy is to his father and how lost the he would be without him. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy can be interpreted in many different ways depending on who you are. But it is clear to most that this is a story of a father and son bond that can not be broken. No matter what obstacles face them they are going to keep walking the road to survive.

Oisin Hyland December 1, 2022 Giknis

In “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, the author uses multiple different literary techniques to keep the reader interested and captivated. From the symbolism, imagery, and vocabulary used, McCarthy utilizes these techniques to encapsulate the fast-moving and action-packed nature of the story.
One of the earliest signs of these techniques is on page 23 where both the man and the boy find a supermarket on the outskirts of the city, the narrator states, “They went back through the store again looking for another cart but there were none. By the door were two soft drink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a pry bar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca-Cola.” After finding the Coke the Man gives it to the boy saying, “It's a treat. For you.” Eventually, the boy asks, “It's because I won't ever get to drink another one, isn't it?”, the man responds “Ever's a long time.” McCarthy chose to use Coca-Cola as a piece of symbolism due to how renowned a can of Coke is in today's society. The idea of a boy not knowing what the drink is, symbolizes to the readers how far removed the characters are from the world that we live in today. It would be unheard of for a kid in 2022 to not know what a Coke is. 
In addition to McCarthy's use of symbolism, he uses bleak and dim imagery or vocabulary to set the mood of “The Road''. On page 78 he writes, “The water buckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything is damp. Rotting. In a drawer, he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” McCarthy specifically chose to use words like, sloping, soggy, damp, rotting, gray light, darkness, and sorrow to make sure the reader feels where the book takes place, a post-apocalyptic, lawless world. If McCarthy was to not use this selection of words throughout the story, the reader would simply not understand the world he was trying to create. 
Cormac McCarthy’s use of symbolism, imagery, and vocabulary plays a major part in the way that readers see his 2007 Pulitzer prize-winning novel, “The Road”. He does an excellent job of using these literary devices to better display and illustrate his book in a way that not many other authors do.