Jean Koster ASME Blog: Developing Career Skills through Design Projects
Professor Emeritus Jean Koster has published an ASME Blog on the importance of capstone design projects for student career development:
"Many industries offer internships to students during semester breaks, largely after the sophomore and junior years in college. For students, engineering internships provide a challenging variety of work. For industry, the internships are primarily designed to find future employees with desired talents.
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"Each engineering company searching for talent, however, must evaluate whether sponsoring a senior design project at a university, or offering internships, or both, fit the company’s needs. Senior design projects are capstone courses where students design, fabricate, and operate a technical instrument while learning systems engineering procedures and training their soft skills. Sponsoring projects supports the universities’ quest for excellence and would satisfy industries’ need to select talent from a large pool of students..."