How many academics have dreamed of their own bespoke class, a course shaped around their own niche interests: a specific historical event, an obscure artform, a technique used by a favorite poet, or anything in between. Commonwealth’s Senior Capstone program is designed to give students with such passions an opportunity to explore them in depth. This year, two seniors embarked on distinctly different yet similarly imaginative endeavors.

Milana Zivanovic ’25 let her original drawings lead her to the construction of a fictional scientific journal, encompassing literary, historical, scientific, and artistic passions. Sarin Chaimattayompol ’25, with an interest in zoning regulations, composed and designed a newspaper to document community voices and share perspectives on Boston’s changing landscape.

Read on to discover how their projects came to life this past year.

Visions of Boston

Sarin, having spent a past Project Week investigating gentrification in Boston’s Chinatown, knew as soon as last year’s seniors spoke to her class about the Capstone program that she wanted to use the opportunity to dive into ideas she’d had around zoning regulations and urban planning—she just wasn’t sure exactly what that looked like, yet.

“At first, I thought maybe I would want to do a research paper, because it’s the easiest way,” she recalls. But after attending a public meeting in Chinatown, Sarin says, her project hit a turning point. “This would be really interesting as a newspaper article,” she thought.

It was at public meetings like that one where Sarin began to engage with the voices of individual citizens rather than “zoning” as a broad, amorphous concept. “Most of the meetings were kind of similar in the way that residents were given a space to talk about their opinions,” she says. “I think it’s really helpful for residents to hear [people with] different expertise and different professions talking about an issue.”

When she wasn’t immersed in public meetings, Sarin was reading up on background information about Boston’s zoning code—which, as she discovered in her research, is close to 4,000 pages long. “When I saw that, I was like, holy cow!” she recalls.

“Part of that is that Boston is so old,” Sarin explains. Still, the code is significantly longer than that of cities of comparable size and is chock full of contradictions and opportunities for confusion. Because of this, a notable portion of Sarin’s writing felt akin to writing a research paper: “I was trying to break down, ‘What is this plan? What is this zone?’ [I was] trying to explain these complex ideas in more of an approachable way.”

The solution: a twelve-page newspaper consisting of news articles on zoning projects, letters to the editor, an editorial on public art, a themed crossword puzzle, and more, designed and formatted in the style of a real publication.

Drawing on her experience as editor-in-chief of the Commonwealth Chronicle, Sarin invested in the creative side of the process as well as her research, experimenting with different tones and voices to create the effect of varying authors featured throughout the paper. For her formatting and design work, she tackled the learning curve of Adobe InDesign, with which she had no prior experience: “That was quite hard at first. I’m not a graphic design person at all, but after I pushed through the frustration, it was really interesting, and it was really rewarding to see the final product look really clean and professional.”

Reflecting on her findings over the course of her Capstone, Sarin has two hopes—the first of which being that the city and those pushing for zoning projects help residents better visualize their proposals. “I think the biggest obstacle to trying to convince residents that a plan is good for the neighborhood is that they don’t give concrete examples, concrete designs for residents who are unfamiliar with the concept to understand what it is and why it helps,” she explains.

Second, she hopes that more people, and especially more young people, show up and get involved in this area. “I really wanted this to target a younger generation, to be like, yeah, go out and talk about it. It’s your neighborhood, you have a say, no matter how old you are.”

“The community around you really shapes your life. It affects your job, your school, your education, your connection with your neighbors. And I think having a say in what dictates your life is really important.”

Fiction, but Make It Real

Milana didn’t originally set out to complete a Capstone project—she was simply enjoying experimenting in her Advanced Drawing and Painting class, creating plant-animal hybrid creatures she calls “a little bit cute and a little bit creepy.” Her original creations and blend of cartoonish and more realistic styles of drawing caught the eyes of friends and family (CM readers may recognize her artwork from this article), and Milana began to realize how much she enjoyed discussing each piece. Toying with the idea of creating a book full of descriptions of the animals, Milana mentioned the project to her advisor, Ms. Jackman, who encouraged her to pursue it as a Capstone. “I had this idea of a Capstone needing to be a research project or research paper,” she says. “I hadn’t realized that a Capstone could be just about anything.”

A creative at heart, Milana wasn’t satisfied with the idea of writing up a collection of descriptions to accompany her drawings. “I didn’t want this to be boring,” she explains. Rather, she turned to stories she’s loved throughout her life for inspiration, describing her final product as “sort of a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.”

“I liked reading things like Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth,” she says. “They’re children’s books, but they’re not picture books. I really liked those whimsical stories.”

Executing the project, however, would not be a simple task, as Milana strove to construct a fictional scientific journal with as much historical and scientific plausibility as possible, as well as a compelling literary framework. Having decided to set her story during a maritime voyage circa the 1830s, Milana soon found herself not only poring over fictional and nonfictional scientific journals, but also delving into historical research on the British Navy and ship hierarchies. That research informed decisions like how different characters would interact with each other given their positions on the ship. She also closely considered environmental factors that she had learned about in science classes, questioning the evolution of the animals and whether or not a given biome made sense in a certain place or context.

Of course, Milana’s creative writing chops played a significant role in the project, bringing the journal to life when paired with her drawings. While the journal possesses a sole narrator, it was important to Milana to construct a wider cast of background characters to add depth and interest to the book and to the narrator himself. “The story’s not supposed to be about his life—it’s supposed to be about what they find on the island, but at the same time…I wanted there to still be hints as to his personality and parts of his life,” she says. To convey these hints in limited text, Milana found inspiration in a technique employed by the likes of Charles Dickens and Roald Dahl: naming characters in such a way that readers immediately and naturally draw a conclusion about them. For example, Milana “called the narrator Horatio Clemens…and then I called another character Augustus Slickson, which I think most people will look at and, somewhere in the back of their brain, register that they’re not really supposed to like him.”

Milana paid close attention to other nitty-gritty details of her creative writing, such as diction, sentence structure, and tone—concepts she came to understand deeply throughout her years of Commonwealth English classes. “You’re thinking about all these things like tone and voice and diction, and what would be a nice metaphor, and you’re kind of doing what you did in English class, but in reverse. Often in class, you’re thinking, ‘What is the author trying to convey through this choice of words about the character, about the story?’ Now, I was trying to think, ‘What do I want to convey about the story or the character, and which words should I choose to do that?’”

While the interdisciplinary nature of her project more than kept her busy, Milana is happy to say that she “enjoyed all the aspects of this.” She plans to self-publish the work, imagining glossy pages for her colorful illustrations and a book fit for fellow lovers of whimsy.

Capstone Counsel

Looking back on a year of hard work and accomplishments, both Capstone scholars encourage younger Commonwealth students to take advantage of the program when their turn comes around. Sarin and Milana have developed their own pieces of advice throughout the process; Sarin, for example, encourages students to select a mentor who is equally as invested in the project as they are, and Milana suggests that, although the course of the project will inevitably shift, it’s helpful to go into it with a clear idea of what you want to achieve so you can hit the ground running.

Both of them, however, are quick to offer the guidance that the best thing you can do is to choose a Capstone project that you truly have a passion for. “If you don’t feel strongly about [your project], I think after a year, you’re kind of going to get sick of doing it,” Milana says. “But if you really like it, then every time you get to work on it, it’s going to be a bright spot in your week. You want to pick something where you’d feel like, every time I have to work on this, I’m looking forward to it.”

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