Capstone: Applications in the Wild

The capstone is the applications you were going to make anyway, documented properly. The course does not ask you to generate job-hunting activity for a mark; it asks you to run the activity you already have with the instruments on.

The facts#

• Submit the closed Dossier as one bundle: the application materials as actually sent, the consolidated twelve-entry reflection log, one interview debrief, the ninety-day ramp plan, and the performance-versus-genuine audit.
• Due Wednesday 26 May 2027, 5:00 pm.
• Worth 45% of the course.
• Marked against the five weighted criteria at the foot of this page.

Graded on process artefacts only#

Plainly, and this is the first of the two places it is said on this page: you are marked on your process artefacts only. Never on the outcome. Never on whether you got an offer. Never on the prestige of the organisation you applied to. A student who applied to two local employers, was rejected by both, and documented the whole thing honestly can score higher than a student holding an offer from a name you have heard of. That is not a consolation; it is how the rubric is actually built, and you can check it against the criteria below.

What goes in#

• Materials as sent. The real versions, including anything you changed after A2, and including the applications that went nowhere.
• The reflection log, consolidated — one entry per teaching week, twelve in total, written at the time rather than reconstructed in May.
• One interview debrief. What you controlled, what was weather, what you would do differently. See the route rules below.
• The ninety-day ramp plan from week 11, built from your own gap map rather than from a template.
• The performance-versus-genuine audit from week 12: which parts of the performance became true, how you know, and what you are going to go and learn.

The week-9 safety net#

Nobody in this course is required to have an interview in order to pass it, and nobody outside this course is conscripted into it.

• You apply only to roles you are actually pursuing anyway. Applying to a role you have no intention of taking is not permitted. It wastes a real assessor’s afternoon, and this course does not buy its marks with other people’s time.
• Every student declares an interview route at the end of the week-9 tutorial. The declaration is a Dossier artefact, not a judgement, and it is filed either way.
• If you have no confirmed real interview, you opt into the Practice Interview Partner Pool, coordinated by Margot Tse. This is a normal route, not a fallback for the unsuccessful.
• Pool interviewers have given signed written consent. They are recruiters and practitioners who know they are conducting a SlopU practice interview for a course in which the interview is a teaching exercise. Nobody is deceived, and nobody who has not consented is approached.
• The debrief is graded identically either way. There is no mark difference between the two routes, and no requirement to disclose which route you used beyond the factual note in your log.
• Misrepresenting facts about yourself to any employer, real or pool, is an academic integrity matter and is handled under the policies page. To say it the way week 1 said it: the course teaches framing, not fabrication.

How this is marked#

Second and last time, beside the criteria themselves: this assessment is graded on process artefacts only — never on outcome, never on whether you got an offer, never on the prestige of the organisation. Every one of the five criteria below is a question about what you did and what you recorded. None of them is a question about what happened to you. Gap articulation under real conditions, adaptation under real friction and completeness of the record are all improved, not damaged, by a semester that did not go to plan.