Capstone Projects

Senior Engineering Student Design Project Opportunity

ECU Engineering Call for Project Proposals is Always Open!

East Carolina University’s Engineering Capstone Design program is a two-semester, real-world engineering experience that connects student teams with industry-sponsored projects. Working over an approximately eight-month period, teams of 4 students tackle meaningful engineering challenges with guidance from experienced faculty and support from a company liaison. Each project is scoped to reflect a substantial professional effort—about 600 engineering hours—and is designed to give students hands-on experience while delivering value to sponsors.

Capstone projects are centered on practical problem-solving and design. Depending on the project, students may design and build a physical prototype, redesign an existing product for improved cost, quality, performance, or manufacturability, develop test equipment or manufacturing processes, create analytical or modeling-based solutions for continuous processes, or contribute to multidisciplinary software and firmware projects. Manufacturing-focused work may also include topics such as facility layout, setup reduction, process control, and equipment selection.

For industry sponsors, the program offers a way to explore promising ideas, evaluate new concepts, and address important business needs that fit within an academic development cycle. Sponsors help define the problem, outline objectives and deliverables, and provide an engineering liaison who can dedicate roughly 2 to 4 hours per month to the team. In return, sponsors gain fresh perspectives, structured engineering effort, and project outcomes that may include prototypes, models, process concepts, and supporting analyses.

For students, capstone is an opportunity to work like professional engineers—translating a real need into a clear scope of work, collaborating in teams, balancing technical and business constraints, and presenting results to faculty and industry partners. It is a chance to build technical depth, communication skills, and confidence while solving problems that matter outside the classroom.

Projects should be suitable for collaboration in an academic setting, meaning they should not be highly classified or overly proprietary, although nondisclosure agreements can be used when appropriate. The goal is to create a partnership where students can develop and present meaningful work, and sponsors can engage with emerging engineers in a productive, mutually beneficial way.

What do you do next?

Contact Dr. Brian Sylcott to discuss your idea or to get the project proposal form. 

Contact Information:

Dr. Brian Sylcott
Department of Engineering
College of Engineering and Technology
Slay 208, East Carolina University
Greenville, NC 27858-4353
Office: 252-737-4652
Email: sylcottb15@ecu.edu