Insights about the capstone experience from 2021 Berkeley MEng Capstone Awardees
What’s been the most important factor for your success?
“Having a goal and a plan to achieve that goal. We laid out what we wanted our application to accomplish early in the year, and made it a well-defined project plan that made it easy for us to track our progress. This helped us identify when we were doing great to keep us confident, and also what portions of the project we needed help on.” — Jasper “By far the most important factor in our success has been our team’s ability to communicate and share information even when we weren’t together. Whether it was conveying test results to each other or informing the team that we were going to be busy the next week and wouldn’t be able to do as much — our ability to foster free and open communication allowed us to solve problems before they became problems.” — Katie “First of all, my teammates and I were able to collaborate well; we formed a close-knit group and were able to support and help one another. Secondly, all of us took this project very seriously and had clear goals in mind. We tried our best and devoted quite a lot of time and energy into achieving our goals.” — James “Determination! As a single MEng student team, there were times where coursework, life, and capstone demands seemed impossible to overcome. However, my motivation to push through these ‘obstacles’ was my determination to develop a device that could address a real world need and improve the quality of life of people I would never meet.” — Diego “I always strive to deliver more than was asked of me and more than what is required. I’m also always willing to learn and improve. I try to set my ego aside when working. Finally, I think it’s important to always think in terms of the big picture. It puts everything into perspective.” — Omokhowa Check out more projects and highlights from the MEng Capstone Showcase: Innovating Across the Globe.Diego Espinoza [BioE], Mission Award (MEDiRoller: Revolutionizing Low-cost Vaccine and Drug Delivery in Low-Resource Communities)
James Liao [ME], MEng Showcase Audience Choice Award (Unmanned Underwater Vehicle with Wireless, LED-based Optical Communication System for Ocean Exploration)
Jasper Lee [CEE], MEng Showcase Audience Choice Award (SafeTport — The Creation of a Crowdsourcing Application for Transportation Safety)
Katie Henshaw [ME], MEng Showcase Audience Choice Award ([Move2Play] Blowing Bigger Bubbles to Get Kids Moving)
Omokhowa Agbojo [BioE], Technical Leadership Capstone Award (Harnessing Life Cycle Assessment as a Decision-Making Tool for Environmentally Conscious Design of Cell Therapy Manufacturing Processes)
Driving success within the MEng capstone experience was originally published in Berkeley Master of Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.