A Method to Provide Student Peer Mentorship within the Capstone Experience

While students entering the capstone course are eager to apply their technical skills, the open-ended nature of the experience can represent a barrier to success. Well-formed planning, communication and intra-team skills are often differentiating elements among the most successful project teams. The abstract nature of these professional competencies requires a contextual basis to effectively develop within a higher cognitive domain. To this end, our capstone course has adopted a platform that offers students the freedom to choose a project sponsor that aligns with their own professional skills or desired learning environment. In a typical cohort we offer a mixture of industry sponsors (small to medium size local companies, emerging startups and established industry leaders) and faculty sponsors developing projects tied to their on-going research. Students have attributed this latitude in sponsor environment, character and style to their success in the course and transition to a professional career. This work offers an extension of this approach to include projects sponsored and managed by post capstone students. Students interested in an entrepreneurial-based experience tend to select this project and cite the nature of the mentorship as a driver for their decision. A template describing the method is presented for potential implementation. In addition, reflections from the capstone students illustrating the impact of this experience on their professional careers are included.