SEAS Pilots Client-Facing Capstone Option for Engineering Students

Harvard undergraduates pursuing engineering degrees can now formally partner with an outside client — including industry partners — for their senior capstone project under a pilot launched this fall by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Students in Harvard’s bachelor of science in engineering program are required to complete a design thesis through ENG-SCI 100hfa: “Engineering Design Projects,” a yearlong capstone course. The new pilot is a client-facing section of ES100, with 26 students enrolled this fall.

Clients will include companies and Harvard research labs, though SEAS has not publicly named them while contracts are still being finalized.

Eric Richardson, one of ES100’s head faculty members, wrote in a statement that widening the pool of potential clients was the central aim of the pilot.

“Increasing client options for students is the primary focus of the ES100 pilot. Good design projects need good clients,” he wrote.

A fall 2025 survey of 116 SEAS students and recent alumni showed demand for the option, according to Richardson. More than half of respondents said they preferred industry-sourced design projects, but few had managed to find industry partners on their own.

Industry-facing projects have long been a leading source of capstone work elsewhere, Richardson noted, pointing to a 2015 survey of capstone design courses at 450 institutions that found industry and government were the most common sources of projects.

“SEAS students are competing for jobs with students that have these opportunities to work with industry partners. We want to give more SEAS students this option,” Richardson wrote.

Rising seniors interested in the section submitted a short application last semester and learned in March whether they had been accepted. Only about half of applicants received a spot, according to Richardson.

Richardson wrote that he selected clients based on the preferences students and alumni expressed in the fall survey. Students admitted to the section then completed a second survey to narrow the pool before ranking a finalized list of partners at the end of the summer, which determined team placements.

This fall’s section is not the first time SEAS undergraduates have worked with outside clients.

ES96, the junior design course for S.B. students, has included client-driven projects for several years. Last year’s ES96 students worked with clients including Emirates Airlines, Terumo, and biomed kitchen, along with several Harvard labs.

ES96 has itself been replaced this fall by ES 55, a sophomore design course intended to introduce students to engineering design earlier in their degrees while reducing project scope and team size. This semester’s ES 55 is made up mostly of juniors as the course is phased in.

Beginning this fall, all ES100 students must complete their capstones in teams. Katia Bertoldi, the other ES100 head faculty member, wrote in an earlier March statement that the requirement was unrelated to the layoffs SEAS carried out last fall, adding that the budget per student will remain $500.

Some students expressed worries that budget and timeline remain obstacles for client-facing design work.

“It’s hard to craft a thesis project that is both complex and interesting, and also cheap enough to have really only like 500 or 1000 dollars to be able to spend,” Justice P. Hickman-Maynard ’28 said.

Tarun S. Sasirekha ’27, who worked with an external client in ES96 last year, said his team ran into such constraints.

“The biggest problem — at least what we felt — was most of the ideas were not one semester projects. It was more of a one year to two years project, and also our budget was really, really low,” Sasirekha said. “It was really hard for us to think of a project that fits under the budget and also satisfies the customer needs as well.”

Richardson said ES96 projects were not meant to match capstones in scope or budget, and that working within limits is part of the training.

“A significant part of the learning experience is for teams to operate under the time and resource constraints that they have,” he wrote.

Sasirekha and Hickman-Maynard also said they were wary of team-based work for industry partners, as opposed to an individual research thesis.

“My personal opinion is that I don’t think it’s actually helpful, changing the ES100 series towards the company,” Sasirekha said. “The reason is because when you talk about projects or companies you’re going to work with, you will be restricted in a certain way.”

Richardson suggested that industry partners open up problems students cannot take on with ordinary research projects.

“I propose that more industry options greatly expand the opportunity for risk-taking and creativity,” he wrote. “Industry projects bring an entirely new set of problems (along with mentorship, tools, and expertise) that simply isn’t available in academia.”

—Staff writer Stephanie Dragoi can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at sd3.28.