Setting Ideas into Action Through Immersive Practicum/Capstone Projects
Group C Courses (“Practicum” or “Capstone” Course)
A requirement for every M.S. Design Science student before they graduate, the DESCI Practicum/Capstone project is an excellent opportunity for students to gain real-world experience while applying what they have learned in their studies. Companies, entrepreneurs, and researchers support the program by identifying open-ended design-based challenges that students will have the opportunity to work on alongside professionals and help generate ideas towards finding a solution.
This one-semester-long project gives students the chance to apply what they have learned from their program while sponsors benefit from graduate students contributing new ideas and knowledge to high priority design issues.
M.S. students are required to complete 3 credit hours of the DESCI 503 practicum/capstone course, or students in the college’s Bridge program or who are planning on applying for a PhD in DESCI should consider taking DESCI 590 instead (independent research course). You are expected to meet with the 503 Capstone Coordinator and attend an informational session during your first Fall term. Please note that you will not be able to graduate until you have successfully completed a pre-approved DESCI 503 or DESCI 590 project. In addition to addressing the prompts in the DESCI 503 proposal form, all Design Science students must also address additional programmatic prompts.
The Capstone project should be a well-defined issue recognized by a company, the community, or U-M research that requires an innovative solution. The project scope and depth:
- Should be defined such that the project can be completed within the time-frame of the UM academic semester (14 weeks).
- Define the number of individuals (from 1 to 4) working on the project and define the necessary academic background and professional experience to successfully complete the project.
There is no “typical” 503 project! This project can take on a variety of different forms—for example, improvements to a process, tools, techniques, recommendations for layout or design improvements, or system modeling. Given the wide range of needs among different industry and faculty sponsors, we seek to be as flexible as possible regarding topic areas. This also allows you to identify a capstone project that meets your individual background, experience, and career interests. Still, the project must meet some minimum requirements in order to receive academic credit toward fulfillment of a degree. The following lists provides the minimal requirements for a Capstone Project:
- Be considered value-added to the project sponsor
- Contains a metric (or set of measurables) to summarize current state conditions, which also may be used to show improvement or the potential for improvement with the implementation of the recommendations
- Students are expected to either demonstrate via their projects an actual improvement over current state conditions or provide evidence and/or effective logic-based arguments of the potential for improvement if the project recommendations are not able to be implemented within the academic term. This potential for improvement may be based on a pilot study/short-term verification study, a simulation, or findings from the project.
- Requires data collection and analysis/modeling
- Students will need to start thinking about their capstone project early, investigating different options that are in alignment with their specializations focus in order to find the best fitting capstone project, faculty advisor, and potential industry/business sponsor.
- All students are required to attend a 503 information session and 503 office hours during the fall semester, and must submit their completed capstone proposal form for pre-approval by the specified deadlines.
For more information, please contact the Design Science program Graduate Coordinator at desci-gradcoord@umich.edu