Capstone Essay

If you have ever tried to read a book while a television is on in the same room, with music playing over it, you have experienced a small fraction of what it is like to have ADHD. I have had it my whole life. Throughout school, it cost me more than once, assignments left unfinished, ideas scattered across the page, grades that did not reflect what I was actually capable of. By the time I arrived at the University of Washington Bothell, though, I had figured something out: the same brain that makes it hard to concentrate and focus makes it very good at moving quickly between ideas, drawing unexpected connections, and drilling into problems that other people may find tedious. My time at UWB did not cure my ADHD. What it did was give me a place to put those tendencies to work.

The thread that runs through most of my work here is a fairly simple question: why do systems fail, and who ends up paying for it? That question first appeared in obvious form in a research paper I wrote for Research Writing on threats to the American power grid. To write that paper I had to move between cybersecurity literature, space-weather research, and energy-policy analysis—pulling from IEEE Xplore, Academic Search Complete, Web of Science, and the Gale Virtual Reference Library. What I found was that the risks were not separate problems to be solved separately. The same political dynamics that allowed energy-industry lobbying to stall protective legislation were also responsible for the aging infrastructure that made the grid vulnerable to geomagnetic storms and cyberattacks in the first place. Tracing those connections across disciplines was exactly the kind of work I enjoyed the most.

That research competency was developed further in a case study I wrote for Intro to Climate Science on the February 2021 Texas Winter Storm. The assignment asked me to examine a single event through multiple lenses, and I ended up mixing together Arctic climatology — specifically, how warming destabilizes the polar vortex and pushes extreme cold southward — with infrastructure engineering, and political deregulation to explain how over 30 gigawatts of generating capacity failed when equipment was not winterized, and with social equity data documenting that Black, Hispanic, and low-income communities suffered disproportionate mortality and economic harm. What the Texas storm made clear was something I had suspected from the grid paper: the technical failures and the political failures are not separate stories. They reflect off of each other, influencing each other. No system is completely isolated, and the American power grid is no different. Writing that essay taught me the necessity of trying to balance multiple standpoints to pull together a cohesive and comprehensive essay.  

The critical thinking I applied to infrastructure, I also learned to apply to media. In fall 2024, for Introduction to Film Studies, I wrote a scene analysis of the climactic confrontation in Dee Rees’ film Pariah. The assignment required me to explain how cinematic technique communicates meaning beyond dialogue, and it pushed me to slow down and pay attention to details I might have otherwise skipped past. I noticed that the cinematographer keeps at least two of the three characters visible in nearly every frame of the scene, trapping them visually in the argument they cannot escape. I wrote about the way the camera’s framing is used “pin” the protagonist Alike against the wall just as her parents’ accusations do verbally, and how the editors’ rapid cutting between angles creates a “visually nauseating” effect that mirrors the emotional violence of the scene. Working through that analysis trained me to be a more careful reader of any constructed communication because we don’t just communicate with words.

All of that prepared me for what became my most ambitious undergraduate project: an independent research report on procurement failures at Seattle’s Sound Transit, written for BIS 398, Directed Study, in the winter of 2026. Sound Transit’s upcoming Ballard light rail extension is projected to cost an obscene $22.6 billion, or $1.8 billion per kilometer—one of the most expensive rail projects in the world, and this is in a city that desperately needs functional rapid transit. When the global average for comparable projects comes in at roughly $238 million per kilometer, something has clearly gone wrong. Synthesizing the NYU Marron Institute’s Transit Costs Project, reporting from The Seattle Times and The Urbanist, and Sound Transit’s own documentation, I identified several interlocking structural failures: a politically appointed board whose members steer design choices toward their own constituencies rather than engineering efficiency; aggressive outsourcing of expertise to private consultants whose incentives are misaligned with cost control; defensive overdesign of stations driven by fear of community opposition; and a pattern of expensive concessions to external stakeholders that have repeatedly forced redesigns and delays. The argument I made — that it is governance structure, not labor costs or construction materials, driving Sound Transit’s price tag — required me to synthesize technical and political analysis in the same way the grid paper and Texas storm essay had, but this time without a course framework to guide me and on a considerably more complex topic. I had to build the argument myself from the source material up.

Looking across these projects, I can see what kind of researcher and communicator I have become. I am able to locate and evaluate sources across disciplinary boundaries, synthesize technical material into writing that a general audience can follow, and connect specialized findings to broader social and political contexts. The MCS program’s emphasis on how media and communication reflect power, difference, and injustice gave me a consistent set of questions to bring to problems that might not look like media problems on the surface, like who controls infrastructure, who shapes policy, whose voices are amplified, and whose are silenced, and that framework has made my research and my writing sharper.

I don’t think I am taking any one singular thing from my time at UW Bothell. It’s a more general whole, a greater understanding of the world, and the ability to recontextualize it or synthesize it in a cohesive and understandable way. From the American power grid, a transit agency, or a film scene. That is what this portfolio demonstrates: a capability to understand any topic and write whatever is needed to result. In the future, I hope to take these skills and apply them. I have interests in sports communication, journalism, script and spec writing for video games and film.