The lights are out inside room 234 in Thomson Hall; the last slide of a Power Point presentation lingers on the wall, and the collective mood is anxious on Thursday afternoon.

Professor Gary Hamilton has just quizzed his class of senior international studies students about their 371-page report analysis on the industrialization of China.

The questions were in preparation for this morning, when Hamilton’s class fielded questions from former UW professor Robert Kapp, an expert in China trade.

“Just be cool,” said Hamilton to his ashen-faced students. “You all did a very good job.”

Today marks the final hurdle in a quarter-long effort faced by all international studies seniors since this capstone project became a Jackson School fixture in 1983.

Offered every winter quarter, eight classes totaling 99 students worked in task forces that covered different topics (which depend on each professor’s specialty) ranging from the economic development of Washington state to an emergency-response policy for the Kashmir region earthquake.

Tonight, all eight task forces will celebrate their accomplishments at an appreciation dinner held at the University Club.

“I’m looking forward to being done,” said Heidi Wickersham, a member of Hamilton’s class. “This is the last requirement for my major, so I am pretty much done after that dinner.”

Each class compiled about 300 pages on their chosen subject, with one student functioning as the editor and one as the project coordinator; the remaining students write between 20-30 pages of the policy report, which is then compiled into a bound book distributed to each student and the instructor.

“[The project] forces students to focus their education on a problem that has practical implications,” said capstone project coordinator Resat Kasaba, an international studies professor. “The whole course tries to simulate a real-world situation where presidential and other task forces are formed and asked to come up with suggestions in even a shorter period of time.”

Students are forced to work under tight deadlines, which don’t leave much room for disagreement.

“It’s really crucial the class comes together as a group,” Hamilton said, who teaches both sociology and international studies courses. “There’s a lot of work, but it’s very different from a normal class.”

Although the overseeing professor assigns the grades, students are most concerned about the professional evaluation of the book.

“They’re not writing for me. They’re writing for him,” Hamilton said of Kapp’s impending evaluation of his class’s book.

Students faced the challenge of pulling together a unified project while doing independent research on their specific aspect of the issue.

“We were writing almost in the dark as to how our individual chapters fit into the overall task force,” said Jing-Lan Lee, also one of Hamilton’s students.

The project has been a quarter-long effort.

“It took the first couple of weeks just to figure the thesis out, and from there, pick our topics,” Wickersham said. “It is difficult to be confident about what you write on such a short timeline for someone as knowledgeable on the topic of Chinese development as Robert Kapp.”

As the student coordinator for Hamilton’s class, Navin Shekar carried the brunt of making sure the chapters of his group’s China policy recommendation related to one another.

“People don’t know what the other person is writing, but the book has to flow logically and have a sense of completeness,” said Shekar, who is also an economics major. “You have to make it work in the real world.”

After 10 weeks of planning and writing, students will finally get to celebrate their own work as well as that of fellow task forces.

“I’m looking forward to hearing the experiences and topics that other groups worked through,” Lee said. “I will enjoy the closure after 10 weeks of active engagement.”

Reach reporter Tiffany Wan at news@thedaily.washington.edu.