Honors Capstone Seminars
Honors Capstone Seminars (HNRS 4461) are for graduating seniors only. As part of the Honors requirements, students are required to enroll in one capstone seminar during their senior year.
The goal of the Honors Capstone Seminar is for students to bring what they have learned in their time at Cal Poly to critically evaluate a topic from an interdisciplinary perspective. Seminar topics will vary depending on faculty expertise. All seminars will provide the following opportunities for students:
- Opportunity for students to approach a topic from varying disciplines or perspectives
- Opportunity to engage in productive group discussion
- Opportunity to work in interdisciplinary teams
- Opportunity to present their teamwork (e.g. group presentations, student-led discussions)
Fall 2026
Far from being “just a game,” sport is a central cultural institution that shapes ideas about identity, authority, and belonging. Who gets to be involved in the world of sports? How do these decisions get made? This seminar examines how sports media construct, police, and circulate ideas about gender, authority, and legitimacy. From broadcast commentary and highlight reels to social media discourse and locker room controversies, students will analyze how women athletes, coaches, journalists, and fans are framed within historically male-dominated spaces. The seminar explores issues of representation, backlash, commercialization, race, sexuality, and digital self-branding, asking how media both challenge and reinforce systems of power. Students will analyze broadcast commentary, viral media moments, advertising campaigns, and digital platforms to understand how women in sport are portrayed and evaluated.
Spring 2027
(Details will be posted soon)
Madness—a remarkably durable, capacious, and contested signifier for numerous forms of mental distress—has preoccupied humans across time and space. Literary artists, in particular, have consistently narrativized, dramatized, and poeticized the many ways that madness matters, but why do they think so, and why, in any case, might an aesthetic discourse be so insistently invested in a psychiatric one? In this seminar, we will approach these categories as reciprocally enriching and examine the ways that (literary) art and (psychiatric) science have cooperated with and contested each other to theorize madness—its causes and its cures, its pain and its power—as an inescapably meaningful, fundamentally constitutive component of our humanity. To do this work, we will engage with texts from a range of salient fields (e.g., literature, film, history, psychology, and psychiatry), and our seminar’s ecumenical approach to its topic will encourage and accommodate a range of interdisciplinary interests that will animate students’ final projects.
This seminar examines how high-achievers think, perform, and struggle under pressure, and introduces mindfulness and self-compassion as evidence-based skills for improving attention, emotional regulation, and resilience. Drawing on research from communication studies, psychology, and neuroscience, students will analyze patterns such as perfectionism, burnout, and self-criticism while developing practical tools to navigate them. The seminar emphasizes experiential learning, reflection, collaboration, and real-world application. By integrating scientific understanding with direct practice, students will build a more sustainable and effective approach to performance and well-being. By the end of the semester, students will be able to: (1) explain key communication, psychological, and neuroscientific principles underlying attention, stress, and self-regulation; (2) identify and analyze patterns such as perfectionism, burnout, and self-criticism in high-achieving contexts; (3) apply mindfulness techniques to improve focus and emotional regulation; (4) apply self-compassion strategies to respond constructively to failure and setbacks; (5) develop a personalized, sustainable mental performance practice; (6) design and present a practical intervention for resilience and performance among high-achievers.
