Partnering with the Carnegie Mellon METALS program as a capstone sponsor provides companies with a unique perspective into employing evidence-based educational technology.
Common Reasons to Sponsor a METALS Capstone
- Relationships that sponsors establish with Carnegie Mellon faculty typically last well beyond the capstone period yielding benefits far beyond the program.
- Becoming a Capstone Sponsor allows companies to interact with METALS students prior to graduation and becomes an effective recruiting tool for them.
- Companies benefit from the unique ideas and perspective that our students apply to client’s projects and problems.
Sponsor Relationship
We ask all sponsoring companies to commit to three in-person meetings with capstone teams in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh meetings are held in January, April or May, and August. These meetings cover the project kick-offer, the end of spring semester report presentation, and the presentation of the final capstone team prototype.
For the remainder of the project, sponsors meet via conference call once a week with teams and remain available over email to provide feedback or answer questions. Sponsors do not actually assist students in any design or development of the course work, however, they may need to make employees or customers available to the students for conducting research related to the project.
Capstone Timeline
The capstone project runs over two semesters for a total of 32 weeks, from the first week of January to the first week of August. The first semester focuses on research while the second focuses on ideation, design, development and usability testing. During the first semester, the students are finishing up other electives for their degree, so they are expected to work on the project only part-time. For the second semester they are expected to work on the project full-time.