Reflections from Recent Graduates on a Computer Information Systems Culminating Experience

Baccalaureate curricula in computer information systems regularly culminate in a capstone experience, a consummate exercise of practice that applies the knowledge and skills a student accumulates over years of study. This culminating experience usually, but not always, explores the wider range of behavior normative to professional competence. We report on a pilot study that gathers young professional’s perception of what impact their culminated experience had on their transformation from student to professional. Besides extending our own understanding of the experience’s contribution to preparedness and confidence for real world tasks, we wish to concretize our pedagogy of competencies that emulate system development in a professional context. This study analyzes our graduates’ perception of lessons learned against the backdrop of their work on an agile, team-based culminating experience. Our findings are based on 14 semi-structured interviews of recent graduates of Bentley University. We also analyze team performance through the lens of social capital theory, where instead of firms working to achieve an organizational advantage, we examine teams working to design and develop superior applications. Finally, we explore each graduate’s perception of the dispositional factors at play in “figuring out how to work together” during a handful of development iterations embedded within a one-semester course.