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Capstone Project Sponsorship

Florida Poly’s Capstone Design course prepares our students to enter their professions through partnerships with industry sponsors.

Sponsoring a capstone design project allows companies and individuals to interact with potential future talent (future hires) while also benefiting from the completion of a project.

Become a Sponsor

Florida Poly welcomes the opportunity to partner with organizations in a mutually beneficial way. To be considered for a Capstone Design project, organizations must submit an online Capstone Design Proposal and provide the associated fee. Proposals are accepted each spring in preparation for the coming academic year (April-June). Organizations are welcome to submit more than one proposal.

For projects that require physical prototyping the fee is $2500 with $1000 of that going for materials specifically for that project and the remainder for maintaining our facilities and equipment. Sponsors agree to cover any additional material cost. For projects that are limited to software, modeling or simulation the fee is $1500 with $500 of that dedicated to support any necessary equipment/materials/software for that project.

Characteristics of Good Candidate Projects:

  • Things you already have a solution for but would like to try something different
  • Things you may want to get to some day but haven’t been able to allocate the resources to yet
  • Open ended projects where they are presented with “here’s the situation, can you improve XYZ”
  • Projects should be semi-open ended. Remember that ‘design experience’ is the criteria.

Projects that are in your companies critical path or are a “make or break” category DO NOT make good capstone projects

If the proposed project is appropriate and selected as a Capstone Design project, the organization will be asked to generate a brief one- to two-page project statement, along with expectations and desired deliverables, as well as contact information of the organization’s project champion/liaison. To ease any organizational concerns, Florida Polytechnic University has generated an intellectual property waiver and a non-disclosure agreement that students can sign (if requested by the organization). In the event that a student does not wish to sign away their intellectual property rights and/or agree to confidentiality, they will be placed on another project that does not require said agreements.

Timeline

  • Proposed industry projects are submitted by March or early April for the fall semester or faculty proposed projects can be chosen for sponsorship at any time.
  • Fall semester activities: Customer needs gathering, idea generation, trade-off analysis, idea selection/planning, generation of an ‘alpha’ level prototype.
  • Spring semester activities: Analysis of sponsor feedback of the alpha prototype, detailed design/design of experiments, verification and validation, testing, generation of a ‘beta’ level prototype
  • Project presentation in late April at the Senior Design Capstone Project Showcase.

Contact

Contact Dr. Matt Bohm by email.