A sense of accomplishment and pride filled the Baskin Engineering courtyard on May 31, 2022. The annual Partners’ Day event is the culmination of two quarters of intensive, collaborative work for students and companies participating in the Baskin Engineering Corporate Sponsored Senior Projects Program (CSSPP).
During the poster session, CSSPP student teams and other capstone project teams, not sponsored by a partner organization, presented their design projects to an audience of faculty, staff, students, and sponsors. Students discussed the problems they aimed to solve, the challenges they experienced, and how they approached those challenges to design innovative products.
For CSSPP teams, three to five Baskin Engineering students were paired with professionals from the company sponsoring their project to address identified issues with the company’s products or services. Applying their programming, web development, robotics, AI, and machine learning skills, students developed novel, technical solutions for real-world problems. From developing a web- and server-based application to support large files and enhance functionality to implementing a third-party auditing tool to optimize and expand university spending, these are just two examples of the student-created tools that will transition into products adopted by their partner organizations.
“This program is a mutually beneficial engagement, where we help students out by giving them interesting projects to work on, which can be applied to industry and potentially a role with us,” said Brennen Direnzo, Keysight automation product manager and CSSPP industry project lead. “And then, they help corporate sponsors by working on projects that will be deployed as real products.”
This year, student teams worked with the following nine corporate sponsors: Cloud Brigade, databricks, Dell, Digital Dynamics, Forever Oceans, Keysight Technologies, Universal Audio, UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, and UC Santa Cruz Business and Administrative Services.
“CSSPP is a win for our students, who get to work on real-world problems for their capstone projects that they can then put on their resumes. It is a win for our corporate partners, who get useful work done inexpensively and who get to decide which students to make job offers to as the work is completed. And it is a win for Baskin Engineering, which receives additional resources to improve our undergraduate educational experience,” said Frank Howley, Baskin Engineering’s senior director of corporate development.
View the Poster Session PDF to learn about the projects. Companies interested in partnering with the Baskin Engineering Corporate Sponsored Senior Projects Program are invited to contact Frank Howley at fhowley@ucsc.edu.
