Capstone

One word. Eight letters. With the ability to strike fear into any college senior. Capstone *que sinister music*. The last hurtle you must overcome to get that piece of paper that says you learned something. It is not until you start capstone that you start questioning what you learned up to that point. Each university has a project like it just with a different name like senior thesis. Most colleges have different requirements and even different majors have to do different things. I will be discussing the ups and downs of the business capstone at Ohio Northern University.

One of the best things is you are not in it alone; you get a team to work with. They may not be your best friend, but at the end they will be. We can spend anywhere from three hours a week up to ten or more. So what is the capstone for the business college at Ohio Northern? It is a yearlong project. At the beginning of the fall semester we are given our teams and we get our client. They are a real business that is facing some type of problem. The first semester focuses on learning the business better than the clients know. We focus on internal business models. We consider their competitors, possible technology, politics, laws, economic situations and much more. At the end of the semester we present this information to the clients and college professors. The reason for this is so we can be told if our ideas are right, if we are missing something, or if we are completely wrong. The very end of the presentation we say “this is the problem you gave us, but we think your real problem is more like this.”

The second semester we focus fixing that problem. The clients are given a few options of ideas we have that can fix their issue. The decide which ones they want to know more information about and from there we start researching those options. We develop marketing plans, financial forecasts and an overall executive plan to deliver to the client and a board of professors at the end of the semester. Around once a week we have some assignment due to our review committee. The document of all the information we delivered at the end of fall semester was a round 40 pages.

Things to remember for Capstone (especially in the business college)

• All teams are different and have different goals and expectations. You cannot compare two teams even if they have the same client. There are hundreds of different paths they could take.
• If you do not know ask. Especially in the beginning things are confusing. I did not have a firm grasp of the situation until a month in. This is mostly because it is expected you know what capstone is even when people refuse to talk about the details.
• You advisor is there for you. Even if you never had them or had them once and hardly remember they will put up a fight for your group and give ideas you team did not think of. It is not their first time doing it.
• You are almost done. Yes, it seems like you have to move a mountain before you can graduate but remember to take it scoop by scoop and soon enough it will be nothing more than a mole hill.

In honor of 100 days until graduation.