Chloe Lew: Capstone courses could ease students into professional world

This quarter, I’m taking my capstone seminar – what I’ve always thought of as the big, grand culmination of my four-year baccalaureate degree.

But when I tell my friends I’m in this class, I’m mostly met with blank faces, which you can imagine makes the news rather anti-climactic.

Each of these blank faces becomes doubly alarming in the light of a recent report released by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which shows that students rate their own work skills – such as critical thinking, written communication and problem solving – far more generously than employers rate them.

That is, while 65 percent of students considered themselves proficient in written communication, only 27 percent of company executives felt the same.

The need for academics to break out of their ivory tower could not be more urgent, and capstones – upperclassmen courses in which students demonstrate the knowledge collected during their undergraduate studies through field research, theses, oral and visual presentations and product designs – could be our way out. Capstones provide students with the exact kinds of projects and settings that foster job skills such as teamwork and communication.

But at UCLA, only 62 of our 125 majors have certified capstones. That only constitutes about 50 percent of the majors on campus.

That means that half of our departments are dismissing an opportunity to prepare students for the workforce while they’re still in the classroom. Every UCLA department should implement capstone projects as a way to smoothly transition students out of higher education environments and into the workforce. This way, UCLA can ensure the students it graduates meet the expectations their future employers will demand and expect.

Granted, UCLA and the rest of the University of California system are primarily research institutes, and as such, they’re fundamentally theory-based. But in order to revive the meaning of our degrees in a competitive job market, there should be more classes dedicated to practical preparation for post-graduate life.

Majors such as business economics have often been criticized for leaning heavily on theory, while neglecting to offer sufficient hands-on experience. But capstone experiences can be designed as the bridge between the safety bubble of college and the real world.

There are various capstone courses on campus that are exemplary as they already stand, and that departments without capstones can look to as a model. Students who study mechanical engineering culminate their degree in a two-course series in which they design and build an autonomous transporting device – working together in small teams during every step from the planning of the model, to budgeting and purchasing base material, and marketing their final project.

Our school of engineering can serve as a model even to already existing capstones that fail to incorporate a professional development aspect: each department as well as the larger school have an Industrial Advisory Board, which includes industry representatives who offer advice about the engineering student curriculum, including the capstone projects.

Meanwhile, the Asian American studies capstone sends students into local communities to research and make recommendations on projects such as cultural and historical preservation, said teaching assistant Aujean Lee.

And just like that, capstones unite education and career, so that employers can directly communicate their expectations for college graduates hoping to work at their companies. More than that, field professionals can provide valuable counsel in both the design of graduating students’ culminating projects and feedback on the final products.

With capstone experience, students graduate armed with a tangible product in their portfolio, whether in the form of a physical machine or a research report supported by community fieldwork – something often more valuable to employers than letter grades or exam results. And in the same way aspiring engineers develop teamwork skills in their design projects, Asian American studies students develop communication skills by practicing interviews with local professionals, such as city developers.

By directly inviting industry professionals into academic spaces rather than merely calling upon them when students are ready for recruitment, universities can instill the work skills that employers seek in new graduates early on in students’ undergraduate careers.

Then, at least, when we rate our job readiness highly on surveys like the one reported by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, we can prove ourselves too.