Behind the Bucket

Seniors at Marist College are forced to accept two inevitable facts:

First, no matter how much we kick and scream, we have to graduate in May.
(Of course, if we wanted to stay another year or so, we could intentionally fail courses and take out some extra student loans, but not many Marist students aspire to live such a “Van Wilder” lifestyle).

Second, in order to shake Dr. Murray’s hand on that fateful graduation day, we must complete our course requirements. This includes the awful, dreaded, ridiculously difficult course known as capping.

Capping courses vary in requirements according to academic major. Some unlucky Finance students I know must write a 40 to 60 page paper (single spaced). The topic of such a paper doesn’t even matter, because the word requirement already seems so unreachable.

For Communications students (like myself), our capping course “brings coherence to a student’s experience in the major by creating connections among the various sub-fields in which students have specialized, and it reinforces connections between the communication major, the student’s cognate, and the student’s experience in the Core” (see: Marist Course Catalog). In layman’s terms this essentially means taking all that we have learned in our previous communications courses and putting it together into one big, semester long project.

Enter: Kicking the [Marist] Bucket.

Knowingly stealing a concept from the 2007 film The Bucket List, the Marist bucket is a list of things to do during a student’s four years at Marist, before they ultimately “kick the bucket” by graduating and entering the real world.

For the purposes of my capping project, I will be taking my goal of conquering my own personal bucket list and turning it into a travel guide for Marist students. This travel guide will include details on where to eat, where to party, and where to take your parents on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, and everything else I can come up with that fits in between.

This blog will serve as a supplement to the writing of the travel guide; it will act as a journal of my travels, as well as a space to share the photos that may not make the cut, or experiences that may or may not be too much to print in a guide for college students. In short, this blog is a way for me to keep it real.

If you would like to read more about me, you may do so here. Otherwise, please feel free to read, comment, and suggest further activities or destinations that I should be including in this project. Enjoy!