Five years ago, UW-Madison’s first cohort of Computer Science students got to take the brand new Computer Science Capstone — remotely (because it was Fall 2020). We had 26 students and three partners at the time (Capital One, Epic, and American Family Insurance). This semester, we added, for the first time, 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.
How The Capstone Works
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 (as well as apply to be a future partner!!). 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.
First, we welcome Product Management MBA students and UX Masters 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, 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. I would love for you to check it out!
Fall 2025 Capstone Partners
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!
- Amazon / Shopbop*
- Atlatl Advisors
- CapitalOne*
- DataCEVA*
- Flexera
- GE Healthcare*
- Google*
- Holos*
- Juniper Journal
- MC Squared
- Noble Reach Foundation*
- Qualcomm
- Qualtim
- RegenMed
- Schneider*
- SmartCert
- Strudel AI
- UniverCity Alliance
- University of Wisconsin – Computational Neuroscience Lab
- Wisconsin Public Media (PBS)*
- Wisconsin School of Business
- Yardstik
In future articles, I’ll be highlighting some of the projects and partners we have this semester. I can’t wait!
Becoming a Capstone Partner
If you’re interested in becoming a future Capstone Partner, please reach out to me. You can fill out our form on the website or reach out to me via email. It would be great to have you join us!
