The capstone program presents a unique opportunity for your organization to work on open-ended design challenges with a team of motivated and newly trained biomedical engineers at minimal cost to you. Although the benefits to this program are extensive, the more prominent features include:
- Low-cost skunkworks R&D: Teams create working, physical prototypes to see their ideas in action. Final project reports and prototypes are sent to the sponsor at the conclusion of the project.
- IP/Confidentiality: Students have the ability to engage in non-disclosure agreements between the team members, course instructor and sponsor, with all intellectual property given to the students and/or company sponsors.
- Year-long recruitment: Your design/engineering team will work closely with a team of 4-6 graduating seniors for two semesters, providing ample opportunity to evaluate them for permanent employment.
- Brand visibility: Your logo will be viewed within the design labs and on electronic advertisements in the Emerging Technologies Building and department website, along with inclusion in printed materials.
- Employee benefits: The design projects act as a training ground for a sponsor’s personnel to manage a remote team for employee development.
- Additional engagement opportunities: Sponsors are invited to judge the Capstone Design Expo, an opportunity to directly interact with current and graduating students in the College of Engineering for recruitment purposes.
“We have sponsored teams for the past six years (up to 10 teams per year) for pediatric device projects to address the need for novel medical devices for children. The teams and their faculty mentors have been excellent in terms of training the next generation of device engineers and entrepreneurs. This experience has been especially successful as a prototype development program where select projects have moved on to further development supported by federal grants.”
Chester J. Koh, M.D. | Professor and Pediatric Urologist | Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine
“BD Urology and Critical Care has worked with several teams in recent years. The students are bright, creative, articulate and determined. All of the projects provided the opportunity to gain real work experience with medical devices. Each team faced and tackled a variety of challenges. I am happy to say that the end result did not disappoint us. So much so, we hired one Texas A&M graduate from a Capstone project to be part of our R&D (research and development) group. We are looking forward to continuing our work together.”
Tracey Knapp | Associate R&D Director | Becton Dickenson