The Senior Seminar for NWU’s Communication Studies program involves an autoethnography capstone project. An autoethnography is a form of qualitative research to explore and connect autobiographical experiences to wider cultural, political, and social concepts.

I used this opportunity to correlate and analyze my experience building up skills and a career separate from my formal educational track — an experience that was wholly different than the other students in my program at Nebraska Wesleyan. After feeling for four years that my college experience was different than my peers’ experiences around me, it felt cathartic to dedicate my final communication studies research to analyzing that comparison and why things were so different.