Every semester, students in their final core course for the QUEST Honors Program work on a project with implications far beyond the classroom. The QUEST Capstone Professional Practicum, known by its course code 490H, enables students to add value to a corporate client by providing recommendations for organizational challenges. 

Cohort 34 prior to their Status 1 Presentations this semester

Samantha Engler, a senior economics and math major, is working on a project with D&H Distributing, a wholesale distributor of technology and electronics goods. For Engler, the project appealed to her interest in systems.

“I’m very interested in the dynamics of systems, and I was really curious in getting to the root of issues within the system that might have multiple issues and how all those interact together,” she said.

Teams are composed of members with diverse skill sets and backgrounds. Having team members with business, engineering and computer science backgrounds has enabled Engler’s team to leverage expertise for different aspects of the project, she said.

Still, Advaith Bantval, a senior mechanical engineering and public policy major, found that even with the various backgrounds on his team, members are contributing to every aspect of the project. The main division, he said, is with faculty and client interactions.

“To be honest, our team has been doing a little bit of everything,” Bantval said. “We did, however, split up the work in terms of who has more client interfacing roles, faculty interfacing roles.”

Bantval’s team is working with government contractor Leidos. Two of the project champions from Leidos are also QUEST alumni, he said.

QUEST students are often confronted with “ambiguity” in their projects, putting the onus on them to figure out a path forward on projects. 

“While the problem might not be given to you very clear cut in terms of the scope, conducting interviews — people that might be involved in the process, people that might work at the organization — seeing what they think the detriments are can kind of highlight what the problem is,” Bantval said.

After a rigorous process thus far, involving process flows, stakeholder interviews and data analysis, the teams are getting ready to finalize recommendations. 

“We’re about three or four weeks out from the QUEST Conference, which is when our final recommendations are due,” Bantval said. “We’re kind of in the home stretch here.” The QUEST Conference is on December 9, 2021. RSVP here to see the results of this semester’s capstone projects!