General Info
The UCSB Engineering Capstone program is greatly enriched through collaboration with all of our partners and sponsors, who provide challenging real-world problems for our students to tackle, and interact with the students throughout the project to provide domain-specific knowledge. Projects generally fall into one of the following categories:
(i) Industry Partnered Projects
(ii) UCSB Research Group Partnered Projects
(iii) Student Defined Projects
(iv) Competitions
Establishing a Project
Industry and research group partnered projects are generally established as follows. In the summer, industry/research partners come up with ideas for interesting engineering design projects and work with the relevant Capstone Staff to fully define the projects for the students. Potential project sponsors then provide brief project descriptions / problem statements, all of which are circulated to the students prior to the start of the academic year. During the first week of Fall Quarter (late September), project sponsors are invited to our Engineering Projects Fair to pitch their projects to the students, after which students form teams and select projects.
Project Timeline
For the projects that are selected, teams are assigned an internal UCSB faculty or staff advisor, and kick-off meetings are held with the sponsors shortly after. Students then proceed to work on the project throughout the entire academic year (October through June). Each team holds an initial design review with their sponsors at the end of Fall quarter (early December), a mid-project design review in the middle of Winter quarter (late February), and a final presentation at the end of Spring Quarter (late May).
At the conclusion, students present their projects at our Engineering Design Expo, a large event that is open to the public. Upon completion of the project, the sponsoring company can elect to keep the final product and is provided with a final design report and all other supporting documentation.
The following timeline lists key deliverable dates:
Thank you to our 2022-2023 Capstone Sponsors:
