My capstone is RocketFest, a student-run Film and Photo Festival for public high school students of the Philadelphia School District. It’s taken a ton of work to get RocketFest to the point where it is now. Starting with brainstorming, from notes apps to google docs we spent hours thinking of ideas and thinking of how to achieve them. Then came outreach, emailing venues, schools, individual artists, potential volunteers, and professionals. We even got a booth at a CTE event. Between Braskem and other funding resources we spent a lot of time perfecting and practicing our pitches to try to get as much funding as possible to make RocketFest 2026 special. This meant creating slideshow presentations, and writing speeches. A film festival can’t happen without getting the word out there, so I spent a lot of time making graphics and posters. Our work was rounded out with logistical tasks; creating the submission form, organizing volunteers, planning day-of logistics, spending our funding money, and nailing down a venue. RocketFest has been a great learning process for me, and I plan on keeping a lot of the lessons I learned this year in mind during my coming years. The biggest lesson being that you can never be too ahead. At the start of the year we were so ahead of the curve, but as the year went on we began to slowly fall more and more down because of the “we’re ahead” mentality. So going forward I know not to get too cocky.

For my Senior Capstone, I created The Nurse’s Truth, a YouTube channel featuring interviews with four nursing specialists; a nurse practitioner, neuro ICU nurse, a CRNA, and a nurse midwife. These interviews are to help students explore nursing as a profession and more importantly the different things you can do as a nurse. The project grew from my own journey of discovering that nurses, not doctors, provide the hands-on patient care that I always wanted to give. After my own curiosity, I wanted to make sure that these insights were available to others too. All interviews were conducted over Zoom, which solved the logistical challenge of one subject joining from Costa Rica. Filming spanned three weeks, coordinated around busy nursing schedules. Post-Production took roughly 20 hours, including editing, graphics, music, and designing the channel branding in Photoshop. I independently managed every aspect of this project; the proposal, outreach, scheduling, filming, and publishing. This project has become a significant milestone in my personal growth. My hope is that The Nurse’s Truth serves SLA students considering nursing, and inspires CTE peers to connect their programs with their passions.

YOUTUBE CHANNEL: https://youtube.com/@thenursestruth?si=JbRBjCIe3pUt9Hj6

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FsQNvOce1tF6cBUkJZTn7yDgP-JNs2Hlr3j0aY5Hfnk/edit?usp=drivesdk