The University of Virginia School of Data Science seeks proposals from academic, commercial, healthcare, nonprofit, and government organizations interested in sponsoring student capstone projects. Capstones are consulting projects that allow students to gain real-world experience in analysis, machine learning, and data engineering. Sponsors are vital partners in these projects, providing a clear objective, data sets, guidance, and orientation to the teams. Capstone projects allow sponsors to explore critical business questions while contributing to the development of the data science workforce.

Capstone projects challenge UVA Data Science students to explore, integrate and analyze data to solve real-world problems. Each team of 3-5 students is advised by a faculty member who has experience in the techniques and data types specific to the project. This collaborative model, delivered in partnership with Riipen, supports employers to build their talent pipeline, tackle immediate business challenges, expand their capabilities, and enhance their brand presence.

Each capstone cycle runs for two semesters, where the first semester typically has students holding discovery meetings with the sponsor and faculty mentor, forming a project plan, onboarding, and reviewing the data. The second semester has students getting into high gear on the project. If you have a bigger project that requires two full semesters of work, you can indicate this here.

All members of the project teams will have completed courses in computational methods for data science, machine learning, and exploratory data analysis, and will possess skills in programming in R and Python. During the program, students also learn feature engineering, data cleaning and wrangling, deep learning, data ethics, project management, team building, technical writing, and oral communication.

UVA policies state that student work performed in a class or capstone is the intellectual property of the learner, not the university or the sponsor.  Sponsors wishing to modify these terms must request that learners sign an IP agreement.  The University can not assign IP it does not own. Sponsors wishing to ask students to sign over IP must provide the agreement language by the contract review deadline.

If you have questions or need help drafting your project content, please review our FAQs or email us at DataCapstones@virginia.edu.

Sponsoring organizations gain valuable insights about their operations in tangible reports and other deliverables. Each project has multiple deliverables:

• A project plan detailing the scope of the problem and plan of work.
• Progress reports
• Data and code artifacts (e.g., github repo)
• The project ends with a paper and a technical presentation.

These deliverables ensure the quality of the work and provide a vehicle for the students to communicate their results to the sponsors and to contribute to the knowledge and understanding of the data science community.