Partner FAQ

Version April 2016
  1. What is the Senior Field Project? A semester long collaboration between a team of 4-6 Brandeis Students and a Partner leading to the development of ideas, prototypes, market validations, or other mutually useful outcomes.
  2. What’s the benefit to the partner? * A chance to tap the creativity and energy of four top Brandeis students * A chance to make progress on an important advanced project * A recruiting opportunity after 3 months of close contact * A chance to mentor and support future leaders in our field
  3. What other partners have you had? This still a pilot program. To date we’ve had partnerships with Adobe, Inc., Streambase (a division of Tibco), The City of Boston, KnowledgeVision, DemandWare, and General Catalyst (a local Venture firm.) We and the partners have been very happy with the outcomes.
  4. Who are the students? This is a selective independent study offered to Computer Science Seniors and graduate students. Once we’ve identified the partner company we go through a rigorous selection process, looking for qualified, enthusiastic and motivated students. To date we’ve always had at least twice as many serious applicants than we could accommodate.
  5. ** Isn’t this kind of like an internship?** No. In fact it is very important to us that the partner understand this as a mutual “Research and/or development” project and that the students work on pedagogically substantial assignments. Clearly they will be learning simply from the experience of working closely with a partner, but in addition they will be learning and using their learning from other courses as they go through the semester.
  6. What kinds of projects are appropriate? There is a lot of flexibility. Often they are investigations or prototyping or research into a product or offering that matters to the partner, but for whatever reason has not made it to the top of the stack. Also they are projects that could benefit from fresh thought or application of current computer science or technology ideas.
  7. What is the POC? He or she will be a mentor and guide for the students. Ideally the POC will view this as a fun way to mentor or share their professional experience. While we ask that he or she will remain engaged with the students, in practice the time commitment has been quite minimal.
  8. What is expected from the POC or other partner staff? This program is carefully designed to minimize the time impact on the partner. In particular, this is not an internship. All day to day management of the team is handled by Brandeis. Thus the time commitment to the partner turns out to be quite modest and flows through a partner team member we refer to as the POC. The time breaks out as follows: * Preparation time to come up with one or two possible projects. * A two-hour kick-off meeting at the start of the semester at Brandeis * Between 3 and 4 interim meetings (one hour) at Brandeis * A final presentation meeting at your office (two hours) * Occasional emails * Writing a confidential interim and final assessment email about the project
  9. What about Intellectual Property? We strongly prefer an informal structure without an NDA or other legal agreement. This is based on our experience so far. It is simpler and quite practical to keep company secrets out of the discussion. The projects we’ve conducted so far didn’t require any formal legal agreements, just an informal letter of intent. However we’re not opposed to some formal agreement if it is required.
  10. How does it work? There are three stages: * Startup phase (2-3 weeks): Students work with the Company POC to decide on an appropriate project with specific outcomes and deliverables. * Work phase (10 weeks): Students work independently on driving the project towards completion. There are 3 semi-formal status meetings with the POC where the students present their progress and calibrate their direction. * Presentation: At the end of the semester, the students organize a presentation and demo of their results, hopefully at the Partner’s office where all interested parties are invited to attend.
  11. Are there any fees? For the pilot phase, no money changes hands. The students are doing this for credit, and the other overhead incurred by Brandeis is carried by us.
  12. What is the schedule? This is a one semester program. A semester is 13 weeks and starts either early September or early January. We generally try to finalize partnerships in the month preceding the beginning of the semester.
  13. Is there flexibility on this model? Absolutely. We are in always refining this model and are more than open to discussing variations on the theme.
  14. How many teams are there each semester? It depends on the projects and the students’ availability. You are welcome to propose (and write up) more than one SOW. While odds are good that the team will form around an SOW, we won’t know for sure until the start beginning of the semester.
  15. How do I start? Review this FAQ and we can discuss it. If acceptable to both of us, then we work together to write a one page “Statement of Work” (SOW) which is then used to recruit the student team for a project targeted for the next semester.

If you have any further questions, of course, feel free to contact me at pitosalas@brandeis.edu.