On a crisp December afternoon, 17 Emerging Media teams presented their Capstone Betas at the NMI’s Fall 2024 miniMerge, marking a significant milestone in their EM journey. Capstone projects are a showcase of the web development, design, UX, branding, and professional skills EM students have gained over the course of their studies.
Along the way, their Betas have been critiqued and shaped by their peers and NMI faculty. But at miniMerge, the teams had the opportunity to receive more industry-focused feedback from a special group of consultants made up of rockstar EM alumni.
First introduced in 2022, the Capstone Consultant program pairs EM alumni with residential and online capstone teams to provide meaningful feedback as the teams look forward to user testing and 1.0 development in the Spring.
“Adding consultants has allowed us to integrate a greater diversity of feedback and perspectives from folks with industry experience who also are deeply familiar with the EM Capstone process,” said Kyla Sterling, the NMI’s Emerging Media Masters Faculty Advisor.
“Some people hear things a 1,000 times and it finally clicks when someone says it in a different way,” said NMI and EM alumnus Eric Daniel, who consulted at the Fall 2024 miniMerge. Eric said he remembers how valuable it was to receive feedback along the way when he was completing his Capstone project.
“I was looking for confidence in my idea, a framework for thinking about it, and a plan to make it happen,” he said. As a Capstone Consultant, Eric aimed to imbue students with confidence in their project and strategize how to wrap it up in a semester.
Several EM students said that their Consultants helped them to better define their project scope, while others appreciated hearing a fresh perspective from professionals working on similar projects.
In a feedback survey, one student said: “It was so special to have consultants take the time to really pay attention to our project and provide thoughtful feedback at the end. It felt like we were getting a fresh pair of eyes on what we had been working on, which I felt was valuable.”
These students will be able to incorporate Consultant feedback this semester as they make the final push to launch their projects at Emerge in May.
EM continues to thrive thanks to all the alumni that give back year after year, and so, we want to THANK our Fall 2024 Consultants one more time!