Update on COVID-19 and its impact on capstone courses |
UBC has announced that all Fall 2020 instruction will take place online and students are unlikely to be able to access campus facilities. Despite these restrictions, we are confident that the capstone courses can continue to deliver significant value to both students and sponsors.
To mitigate the impacts of COVID-19, we will be focusing on the following:
If you would like to sponsor a project but you are not sure if it will “work” under COVID-19 restrictions, please just contact us and we will do our best to find a way. |
We are always looking to connect with potential project sponsors with innovative and challenging ideas! We generally solicit projects in the spring, work with the sponsors throughout the summer to refine a project’s scope and inputs, and then present the projects for selection by student teams at the start of the academic year, in September. But don’t hesitate to contact us if you have a potential idea – the sooner we start talking, the better. Some recommendations for a compatible project are:
- The project inputs are clear: data, equipment, code, documentation and any other inputs are ready to go so students can hit the ground running.
- The focus is on innovation rather than cost reduction or product development: cost reduction and product development both require long and detailed study, which is not well suited to short-cycle student projects.
- You would like the project to answer a finite number of well-defined questions: diffuse, open-ended, or exploratory projects can be difficult to pin down; we love research projects, but we need to identify clear questions and objectives first.
Below is a brochure summarizing key points of sponsoring a project, including questions of intellectual property ownership, cost, and timelines.
Please contact the Lab Director, Dylan Gunn, at dcgunn@physics.ubc.ca if you have any questions.