Earlier this month, the QUEST community celebrated the culmination of nine semester-long capstone projects with Cohort 40’s QUEST Conference at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center. Attendees enjoyed poster presentations, snacks, and even a dessert intermission! During the event, I had the chance to talk to some of the teams about their project.

Brian Langbein, of the creatively named QUEST “R” Us team, detailed his experience working one-on-one with the Toy Foundation. The Toy Foundation is a non-profit organization who recently formed a partnership with the Robert H. Smith School of Business at UMD to create a Toy Retail Laboratory. This laboratory, which will also function as a toy store, will be integrated into the Smith School’s Product Management Program curriculum, providing students with the opportunity to learn more about business analytics and consumer trends, specific to the toy industry. Langbein and his team were responsible for laying the groundwork for this idea by deciding what the best location is and building a financial model for the cost of the Laboratory itself based on their research. Throughout this process, the team worked one-on-one with industry professionals, faculty advisor Dr. Jeff Miller, and the Toy Foundation clients, where Langbein played a core role in helping his team collect the data they needed for their analysis. When asked about his biggest takeaway from the project, Langbein explained how “understanding the problem really is the most important part of the project. It is cliche, but having a good understanding early on will set you up for success.” 

I also had the chance to talk to both Nandini Shah and the client her and her team worked with, Dr. Sabrina Curtis of Khanjur. Khanjur is a start-up company founded by UMD alumna, Dr. Curtis, who specializes in developing and implementing shape memory alloy (SMA). This material can change its shape depending on the temperature of the environment it is placed in, making it an extremely versatile material. Because of its versatility, there are many industries it can be applied to. Shah and her team were responsible for determining which, among the many industries, were most profitable for Khanjur. This entailed hours of reading technical-heavy research articles to learn about this niche subject of materials engineering and SMAs as well as developing a growth plan that detailed the necessary steps Khanjur should take to enter these industries. Looking back on her experience, Shah revealed that she was initially overwhelmed but also excited about the breadth of information. With the help of Dr. Curtis and faculty at UMD, she and her team became more confident in the subject. “Learning about the material science industry really broadened my perspective [as a computer science major] because SMAs can be integrated into the types of technology that we are familiar with, such as iPhones,” Shah shared. 

Their work really paid off as Dr. Curtis stated that thanks to their efforts, Khanjur now has “the hard facts, the numbers, and the companies. [Shah and her team] helped fill in the final missing gap by finding these brand new markets that do not exist for my material. They found concrete evidence that makes pursuing these markets a possibility.” 

Lastly, I talked to the Most Outstanding Capstone team, Capital QUEST Consulting. They worked with Capital i, a healthcare technology management solutions company, to improve their medical equipment database. They came up with three recommendations: create a dashboard to track the progress of their data, implement a custom catalog builder to standardize naming conventions, and add features that prevent future naming inconsistencies from occurring. They were incredibly successful as they were able to denote errors in the current database in under a minute and made it sixty times faster for Capital i to standardize their system! I talked specifically with team members Caelia Chung, Karen Nguyen, and Ashmita Pyne more about some of the problems they faced. Chung explained that “the hardest problem was the vastness of the medical device database and trying to think about how to tackle every single device that needed to be corrected [in the database].” Despite these challenges, they learned a lot from their QUEST experience. Pyne explained that QUEST greatly improved her public-speaking skills while Nguyen emphasized how QUEST taught her the importance of leveraging every team member’s strength. Congratulations Capital QUEST Consulting for winning Most Outstanding Capstone Award!

I think it is safe to say that this QUEST Conference was one for the books as these QUEST teams really proved they can tackle a variety of problems. To all of Cohort 40, congratulations on completing the QUEST Honors Program! We cannot wait to see what other achievements you accomplish!