Other than our presentations at Boston Scientific and SCOPE Summit, SCOPE is over. We turned in our report and all our other deliverables on Friday. I was planning on writing one reflection on SCOPE, but my thoughts on sponsors, NDAs, etc. ended up longer than I expected, so there will be multiple SCOPE reflection posts. Here are my thoughts on corporate sponsorship.
I used to be very much on board with the idea of companies sponsoring senior capstone engineering projects. I am less so now. I can still see a lot of upsides; people who develop and work on engineering projects all the time are better than a group of seniors would be at identifying a meaningful problem of the correct scope for a project like this. The SCOPE office also tries really hard to get projects that align with the interests and skills of the class of students in SCOPE. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a major reason my project existed this year was to be a really good option for three of us. So my problem with company-sponsored projects isn't that it leads to poor match between project and students.
One of the biggest problems is that companies mean non-disclosure agreements, and we've ended up with some pretty strict NDAs. Several teams can say very little beyond what is written in their short project descriptions. The SCOPE program is always considering whether it's better to have projects with "cooler" companies even if it means stricter NDAs, and I definitely prefer more lenient NDAs. (Ours wasn't actually that strict compared to many others, but it was still frustrating to not really be able to talk to people on grad school visits about what I'd done.)
In the end, for me it's a question of what the point of SCOPE is. SCOPE isn't really about learning. Certainly we all learned things along the way, but those were really project-specific things. Maybe there's some learning about how to work in/with a company and deal with bureaucracy, but most Olin students have at least seen that in internships. The longer project timeline changes the nature of some of that, but SCOPE is fewer total work hours than a lot of summer internships are, and working with a company is really different from being in the company every day.
So if SCOPE isn't about learning, then it has to have other goals. As a capstone, it should be some kind of culmination of what we've learned at Olin. It's what helps us synthesize and practice the skills we've learned. From that point of view, the ideal project is an interdisciplinary project that is interesting from both a technical perspective and a design perspective. The other role it seems like students want a capstone to fill is that of a large project that they can talk about in applying to jobs and grad school. This is where the strict NDAs become a problem. Because it's a year-long course, SCOPE projects are the longest-lasting and largest-scoped projects most students are involved in at Olin other than large project teams. Students usually have more ownership over a SCOPE project than they would over a project at an internship (though a lot of Olin students work at start-ups, and that's less true in that case). Those characteristics of SCOPE projects make them, in the ideal case, good evidence of everything a student has learned at Olin and a good example of their skills and work. But often in SCOPE we do a cool, interesting thing and then can't talk about it. As one of my classmates said, "If you do a cool thing and can't tell anyone about it, did you actually do a cool thing?"
One solution to this is to stop doing company-sponsored projects; find some other way to come up with meaningful senior capstone projects. (There's precedent for this at Olin. The alternative to SCOPE, Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship, is not sponsored by companies.) But that won't happen, largely because in many ways, SCOPE isn't for the students. SCOPE is for Olin. It provides very good publicity for the school, and the SCOPE program pretty much funds itself. Companies pay a set amount to have a SCOPE team, and that goes into SCOPE team budgets and the salaries for the Olin faculty and staff who do SCOPE-related work. So the solution -- if as a program SCOPE decides that strict NDAs are a problem that needs solving -- is to shift the kind of companies we work with consistently.
The other major problem with working with companies is that the SCOPE team is not high priority. This makes sense; the projects aren't mission-critical for the companies and SCOPE projects tend to be more on the exploratory side. It can still be really frustrating for the team to be unsure when/whether you're going to get helpful resources or information. Projects that were less reliant on outside resources would avoid this issue. On the other hand, dealing with some of this is one of the points of SCOPE, and a true capstone of an Olin education must have some outward-facing component. There are always going to be difficulties associated with that.
So, I'm no longer sure that companies sponsoring senior capstones is the best way to go. It accomplishes some of the goals of SCOPE better than other options would, but it undermines other things that I think should be goals of a capstone. SCOPE will remain company sponsored at Olin unless something changes very dramatically because having corporate sponsors really benefits Olin, but at the very least I hope there's a shift towards projects with less strict NDAs (and I wouldn't be surprised to see that, given current conversations).
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