{"id":3036,"date":"2025-09-30T05:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T10:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amberrfield.com\/staging\/1483\/?p=3036"},"modified":"2025-09-28T10:56:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T15:56:23","slug":"uw-madisons-comp-sci-capstone-partners-fall-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amberrfield.com\/staging\/1483\/uw-madisons-comp-sci-capstone-partners-fall-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"UW-Madison’s Comp Sci Capstone Partners Fall 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Five years ago, UW-Madison’s first cohort of Computer Science students<\/a> got to take the brand new Computer Science Capstone<\/a> — remotely (because it was Fall 2020). We had 26 students and three partners at the time (Capital One<\/a>, Epic<\/a>, and American Family Insurance<\/a>). This semester, we added, for the first time<\/em>, a second section! We have a total of 168 students in the course and 22 partners and I couldn’t be more pleased with how the semester is going so far. Our partners are amazing and I’d like to take a moment to introduce them to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How The Capstone Works<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you haven’t heard of UW-Madison’s Comp Sci Capstone program, let me give you a brief summary. You can read more about it at our official website<\/a> (as well as apply to be a future partner<\/a>!!). We partner with corporations and non-profits who come up with real-world projects for our students and provide 2-3 mentors as well. In class, we form student teams of 4-6 who work on these projects for the entire semester. So far, this sounds like every other capstone course, right? Well, we’ve added a couple of things to ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, we welcome Product Management MBA<\/a> students and UX Masters<\/a> students to our course to create more well-rounded, cross-functional teams — more akin to what you’d see at a typical company. On top of that, because I’ve been a project manager, engineer, executive, and hiring manager in tech my entire career<\/a>, I’d noticed that a few key things were missing from most Comp Sci university programs. Things like how you collaborate on a team and what the heck Scrum is. So, I teach various frameworks and techniques throughout the semester and require the students to use them. They learn Lean Start-up, Google Design Sprints, Design Thinking, Scrum, Kanban, Git, JIRA, AI and a lot of other essential skills. If you’re interested in learning more about the curriculum, I wrote a book the mirrors the course called Agile Discovery & Delivery<\/a><\/em>. I would love for you to check it out!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fall 2025 Capstone Partners<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Without further ado, I’d like to highlight the Capstone partners that we’re working with this semester. Starred partners are returning partners! I am so very grateful to be working with all of these amazing mentors this semester. They really change the lives of the students on their teams and I couldn’t be happier to have them join us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n