Here's what students, faculty advisors and companies are saying about the importance and impact of participating in the Industry Capstone Program.
Alumni Participants
Joshua Casado '24, MBA
My experience in the Industry Capstone Program (ICP) was transformative. Guided by Professor Vazacopoulos, our team gained invaluable insights and skills throughout the semester. Serving as co-team lead with Josh Kozohar, we tackled the project "Leveraging LLMs and ChatGPT for Enhanced Decision Making in the Financial Industry (FICO)." This provided us with real-world experience in a rapidly evolving industry. Our efforts concluded with presenting our findings to FICO employees, a moment that underscored the practical applications of our academic knowledge.
Gavin Landi 24, MBA, Finance
Serving as the MBA lead for my Industry capstone course with Whitestone Associates was an incredibly rewarding experience. Our team developed a personalized search tool designed to enhance Whitestone's M&A advisory engagements, providing a unique edge in a competitive market of Fluid & Motion Control M&A. This project allowed me to apply the strategic management principles I learned from Pranav Garg’s course, particularly regarding the importance of diligent project management and strategic positioning when developing an early stage product. These skills proved invaluable not only in the successful completion of our capstone but also in my securing a full-time role at a global fintech company, where I now lead strategy and sales initiatives in the US.
Kuntal Gupta '22, Analytics MBA
This course has helped me better assimilate to the working culture of the United States and gain exposure to relevant and necessary professional skills.
Shunzhi (Iris) Zhang '22, Analytics MBA
I worked for Hoboken Hospitality Alliance, which helps support local restaurant operators & vendors. We mainly worked with Community Delivery, a platform where people can order food online from local restaurants without being charged an extra fee. My main job was to promote this app. We also successfully helped one of the local restaurants do an email campaign.
Fudi Liu '21, M.S. in Business Intelligence and Analytics
Taking on this challenge was very helpful for my future studies and career. In the semester after the project, I participated in the UBS Machine Learning Competition and won first place. All of these experiences helped me get a job doing analytics for a marketing agency in New York.
Yusuf Khan '18, M.S. in Information Systems
As a data scientist, it's very important to know how to translate a business outcome into a machine-learning problem. This experience has helped me understand business objectives and how to ask the right questions before implementing a solution.
Corporate Partners
Matt Cristaldi, Cofounder & Executive Officer
As a growing company we thoroughly enjoyed working with the students and faculty in the Stevens Industry Capstone Program. With professional guidance from the faculty, the students prepared detailed materials and research that was instrumental for our product development, business presentations, partnerships, and more importantly, our market strategy. The work they conducted will live long after the class is concluded!
Greg Finkelstein, former Senior Vice President, Wiley
The recommendations provided by the students were not only well thought-out and sound in strategy, but they each aligned with our bigger business strategies and initiatives.
Ann Murphy, Price Optimization, Wakefern Food Corp.
Participating in Stevens’ Industry Capstone Program allowed us to connect with students and gain a different perspective on business problems. The students were tasked with analyzing large data sets to provide insights. Wakefern is committed to supporting the communities we serve and value the opportunity to support higher education programs.
Faculty Advisors
Zachary Feinstein, Assistant Professor and Director of the Fintech Certificate Program
In advising the Industry Capstone, I have seen first-hand how students apply the tools they learn through coursework to solving real-world challenges of our corporate partners. As opposed to usual course projects, within the industry capstone, the team of students come from varying degree programs. This collaborative effort makes the team greater than the sum of its parts as students use their different backgrounds to solve complex problems. Under my supervision, I have seen students use sophisticated methods to scrape data and impute missing information in completely novel ways to assist the industry client to make real decisions.
Michael Parfett, Professor
I have been a facility advisor for 3 capstone projects over the last few years. I have seen the students apply what they have learned in the classroom but also much more. The first project was with eMazzanti. This is a well-established company headquartered in Hoboken. It is an IT support company: providing 24 x 7 support to its customers; security and privacy; on boarding for customers; improvement of identified and prioritized of work processes etc. The Stevens team had access to the CEO, and other leaders as well to different parts of the organization. This gave the team a good feel for how the real-world works while solving issues the company was addressing, using what they had learned at school. The second project, Piko: was a company that produced organic baby food. It was a very small company; most of the teams’ interface was with the CEO. They were only in Hawaii and wanted to expand to the Northeast. The team had to do market research, develop consumer insight, understand the competition, research operations – analyzing farming, logistics and distribution. This required cross functional teams from several of our degree programs. The third project was with CoCarting. A startup that was trying to launch a new product that did not exist in the marketplace. That is to have people shop together on line e.g. preparing for a wedding; going to college; shopping with friends etc. The team needed to do market research, help identify the user interface, and work with the company to define the launch. The team had access to all the leaders in the firm, which gave them a great look at how senior team members work together. In addition, they were development issues, as well as an issue defining a usable user interface – both on a mobile device and on a computer. These were critical for the launch, so the work plan was re-defined to focus on the companies’ critical needs. Shifting priorities occurs often in the real world.
The School of Business is a AACSB accredited organization. Part of that accreditation means identifying goals and ensuring they are met through continuous improvement. As part of Assurance of Learning (AoL) there are 4 principle goals:
Communicate effectively both written and oral.
Work effectively in teams.
Understand how technology impacts business.
Demonstrate Critical thinking skills and creative problem-solving capabilities.
All of these skills will be used in a Capstone project.
Patricia Saporito, Adjunct Professor
I’ve been an Industry Capstone Project advisor since 2021 and have enjoyed the experience immensely.
The projects I’ve managed have run across multiple industries including a skin care product, financial service product, sporting equipment, an ecommerce subscription service, a medical device and an electric grid discovery software solution.
It’s very rewarding to see the students complete a project within a semester and have something truly tangible to show for their efforts. They are able to both apply existing skills and to develop new ones. Some students have taken Fundamentals of Consulting with me and then have worked with me on the Capstone project.
Lastly, as a volunteer small business mentor, I’ve also referred project sponsors to the program. The sponsors are extremely grateful to the students for their efforts which have helped these entrepreneurs advance their businesses. A win-win for both the students and the entrepreneurs!