CAPSTONE: What You Should Know!
It's finally the last year. The last 3 years were complete hell but you finally made to the start point of the final race. But before you enter you should know a few things and how it works.
The Beginning:
In the first class the professors will welcome you and explain what capstone is. Following the first session, a list of projects will be posted for you to select your top 3 choices.
Now for some Do and Don'ts
Do make a team prior to selecting a project. Make sure you people you trust and get along well with because no matter what the project is, you'll have a great time doing it. A lot of people say you should not join your best friends in a team but that's just incorrect. You either work with people you know and trust or you work with a bunch of misfits you've never seen in any of your classes and risk doing most of the work.
Do ensure your team is diverse in their skills. Or at least enthusiatic about learning new skills. If you have a team of designers, no one will want to do paper work or programming/controls etc. Make sure you have someone who doesn't mind being the leader and doing all the paper work and presentations.
Do take on some new responsibilities. It is good to acquire new some new skills at this time. If you're good at design make sure to get some exposure to simulation or programming as well and etc.
Do keep a log of all the work you do in your black book. It will come in handy if you're in a situation in which you are proving your contributions. Happens more than you think. Add the date and list of things you worked on that day.
Do take advantage of Google Apps. Make use of Google Drive for file management, Calendar for all meetings. And Slack for team communication. Make productive use of all these resources. Invest more time at the beginning into this. Make sure everyone gets all these apps on their phones. Make a Gantt Chart only for grading purposes, because nobody ever uses this useless project management tool.
Do dedicate a bullshit artist for all your presentations to take all the Q&A from the staff. There may be some tough questions which expose your lack of understanding or something you may have overlook. You need a politician in this case to deflect these questions.
Do get a head start on manufacturing. This applies if you are in mechanical. You may think you can get your bracket manufactured in 5 hours but in reality it would take close to 20 hours due to the busy EDML staff and also the lack of tools sometimes. If you're not manufacturing large items, ignore this.
Do go on vacations during winter break or anytime you find through the year. Don't listen to the staff about the importance of making good use of these days because no one ever does. The work you may get done during these days can also be accomplished in late nights too. But you probably know your state better than others do and how much shit you might be in if you miss another deadline. Play Hard. Work Harder.
Do attend career fairs. You have 2 career fairs throughout the year. Make use of them. Some of our members had been hired through these events by talking about their capstone project.
Do network with professors. It will be beneficial in grading you at the end. Additionally they may have industry connections and its also great if you plan to pursue a masters. You'll need their help and insight for capstone.
Do make it a habit to check Moodle. As bad and ugly as this system might be, all capstone updates are posted here. And it happens frequently. Keep yourself in the loop of what is going on. You may hate your team member for always being lost and uninformed, so don't be that guy.
Don't just hope you get a good team. Get to know the people who are also choosing that topic. You risk ending up in a group of misfits who you've never seen in classes except for the final exams. These people might be hard to work with sometimes and may also lack any useful skills for this project. If you find yourself in this situation then capstone is already a dead horse. Better to kick it across the finish line with a good team rather than yourself.
Don't select a pity project they have every year for the people who don't know what they want to do. Examples of these are the concrete toboggan, sailboat, motorized stand-up desk etc. You want something you can proudly talk about in an interview or put on your CV. These projecst are just meh. Make sure to avoid these type of projects whatever engineering discipline you are in.
Don't buy a black book. they will provide you one.
Don't attend all capstone lectures. Most of them are useless and present intuitive information. Make sure one person from your team attends and signs the attendance sheet for all if they are taking presence. They will try to scare you by sending emails saying the following session attendance is MANDATORY. But yeah, you don't need to go except for when they explain rules for the EDML.
Don't fall behind in your classes. It's obvious and it's also hard to do. Imagine you have a job lined up at the end of April, but you need to do another fall semester. Or your friends are graduating on time, while you have to watch them from Facebook pics and graduate alone the following semester.
Don't take on more than what you can handle. If you're taking 4 courses plus capstone, and you decide to also take on a part time job, just don't. Your team will hate you for it. They will never see you at any of the meetings and you may risk the professors finding out through complaints or through analyzing your contribution and responsibilities towards the project. Either keep the part time job and drop a few courses or dedicate to academia only.
Don't forget to keep your capstone supervisor in the loop. CC them in your emails to other staff. Some supervisors are like ghosts and only show up on demo day. It may look bad if they start asking basic questions on the final day.
There are more Do/Don'ts for your general academic career that you should keep in mind. But we thought we should share some specific ones we learned through our experience.
Make sure to enjoy what you're doing!
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