Bridging Education and Industry Innovation

This year, when Seattle University’s Project Center presents its 38^th annual Projects Day, it will once again put on display the culmination of months of work by science and engineering students on real-world projects sponsored by dozens of companies, organizations and nonprofits.

Since Projects Day began in 1987, more than 600 students have been hired by their sponsoring organization who have implemented some 65 percent of the completed projects into their operations. In fact, 30 patents have been awarded from the work of SU students.

Connecting students with potential employers while gaining invaluable real-world experience—from collaborating in a team to critical thinking, troubleshooting a complex problem to working through challenges to reach a promising result—is the nucleus of the work of the Project Center.

For this year’s Projects Day, happening June 6, student teams and their sponsors—covering 42 projects from 37 sponsors—will showcase, via captivating presentations, vibrant posters and immersive interactive exhibits, their achievements and what is possible when students collaborate with industry leaders. Among the sponsors are Amazon, which has four projects in different areas, along with Seattle City Light, Desimone Engineering, Kenworth/PACCAR, F5, the Archdiocese of Seattle, Snohomish County Office of Energy and Sustainability and many more.

“Innovation comes to life at Projects Day, where Seattle University students apply their knowledge to real-world challenges,” says Rachael Brown, director of the Project Center. “This longstanding tradition gives students the opportunity to grow as problem-solvers, gain career-ready skills and make an impact alongside industry partners. It’s a powerful example of applied learning in action.

Here’s a look a few of the projects students worked on for their senior capstone that will be represented at Projects Day:

Desimone Engineering
Sponsor: Desimone Engineering (led by Jeff Dragovich, ’88)
Project: The Desimone Distributed Compute Control (D2C2) system was developed through the collaboration of two previous capstone projects to support DCE’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) tasks, which include nonlinear seismic and wind response of structures and foundation design. The SU team’s scope involved the development of new features within D2C2, extending D2C2 from a cloud-based Azure Batch execution design to a system that supports both cloud and on-premises environments.
Student Team: Cuong Au, Zachary Mullen, Tina Nguyen and Ryan Thomas (Computer Science)
Faculty Advisor(s): Brian Daugherty, associate chair/assistant teaching professor/Computer Science

As Jeff Dragovich, representing Desimone Consulting Engineering, advises a student team on a sponsored project, he does so from a place of both memory and a deep connection to Seattle University and the College of Science and Engineering.

When he was an undergraduate studying engineering here in the 1980s, Dragovich recalls doing his own capstone project in what was then the fledgling years of the Project Center. Graduating in 1988 with a degree in civil engineering, Dragovich would return to his alma mater years later as an adjunct professor (2000-2003) and later an assistant professor (2003-2009), teaching in the same college where he learned about the value of working with a company on a project that has real-world implications. It’s a full circle moment for Dragovich, who heads up the Applied Technology and Research Group at Desimone, which is in its third consecutive year of sponsoring a project.

The current project is a continuation—and denouement—of one that started last year. Picking up on the existing work the team set out to develop a set of applications that control the execution of engineering analysis software.

“The existing system is for basically distributing computing. It’s a system where you had to use a remote computer,” explains Dragovich. “We talked with the IT department and said, ‘why don’t we develop a system where we can launch these computer models on (Microsoft’s) Azure that will then free up your computer.’” The system will be implemented this summer.

There were unique challenges in picking up and continuing an existing project over one that you’d start from scratch. On the other hand, there were also some benefits, notes student Zachary Mullen.

“It felt like a real-world experience for me to analyze the good and bad of what was already done and realize what needs to be changed or left unfinished,” he says. “It’s an experience you can’t get in the classroom.”

The Desimone team with faculty advisor Brian Daugherty.

“What originally drew me into this project was how detailed the scope was, compared to others. In other projects you might see stretch goals or see where AI fit in,” says team member Tina Nguyen. “But this was very detailed and required skills I didn’t have experience in. Working on an existing project helped me learn a lot.” Nguyen singled out the new technology she learned doing this hands-on project, like how to code, something quite different from learning about this in a classroom setting.

As faculty advisor, Brian Daugherty, associate chair and assistant teaching professor from Computer Science, had various roles to help guide the project along, working in close collaboration with the students and sponsor.

“Part of my role is to coach the students on how to deal with challenges (such as) technical and scope changes,” says Daugherty, adding that this type of project also helps students navigate interpersonal issues working in collaboration with peers and a sponsor, with deadlines and results-oriented expectations.

While the team members are still considering their options post-SU—jobs, graduate school down the road—they all agree that what they learned during this project has bolstered their skills, mirrored an internship and provided clarity on future professional pursuits.

“My biggest takeaway was trying to figure out what my plan is after college, that software can be applied in all different types of industries,” says student Ryan Thomas. “I realize, after working on this project, that I really like consulting and working with a civil engineering firm.”

Archdiocese of Seattle (Project I) & Archdiocese of Seattle Office for Catholic Schools (Project II)

Sponsor: Archdiocese of Seattle (led by Elijah Morgan)
Project I: As part of the Partners in the Gospel initiative, the Office of Planning and Mission Effectiveness sought to strengthen long-term pastoral planning by analyzing demographic trends and parish participation. This project addresses a critical need to understand how cultural communities and young adults engage with parishes, identifying key growth patterns, parish-level impacts and potential future shifts in Catholic participation.
Student team: Janani Krishnamurthy, Satwik Kunaparaju, Ting-Yu Lin, Prasanna Nalabothu and Surya Ramesh
Faculty Advisor: Ariana Mendible, PhD, assistant professor, mathematics

Sponsor: Archdiocese of Seattle Office for Catholic Schools (led by Nicholas Ford)
Project II: The Archdiocese of Seattle oversees 74 Catholic schools with a 99 percent graduation rate. To improve operations, the Office of Catholic Schools partnered with a student team to analyze enrollment, finances and demographics. Using machine learning and interactive dashboards, the team uncovered key trends to help school leaders make data-driven decisions that can ensure long-term success and sustainability of Catholic schools.
Student team: Ruby Cheung, Tileshwar Narayan, Abhishek Sawant and Vy Tran
Faculty advisor: Joanne Hughes Clark, PhD, associate professor, physics

This is the second consecutive year that the Archdiocese of Seattle has partnered with the Project Center. The archdiocese teamed up with the Project Center on two projects. On this first one, the team—comprised of Master of Science (Data Science) students—was tasked with analyzing a considerable amount of data to map demographic trends and parish participation rates among specific communities, with a focus on young adults. Experience with data science proved pivotal in working through a solution to the “problem” presented by the archdiocese.  

The project supported the Partners in the Gospel initiative looking at trends across 136 parishes in Western Washington. The SU team was tasked with two primary goals:

• Analyze the historical growth and parish-level impact of cultural communities.
• Investigate changes in young adult Catholic engagement over time and across regions.

Elijah Morgan, director of Planning & Mission Effectiveness with the Archdiocese of Seattle, says “the first objective was really looking at our cultural communities in the archdiocese, including language and backgrounds and then looking at engagement and engagement trends to see if there are things we have done or should be doing to be more proactive. And then we looked at how young adult Catholics are working with parishes and churches, both locally and in the U.S.”

Student team member Janani Krishnamurthy says the most rewarding part of tackling this project was the experience of “working on a real-world, mission-driven initiative that directly supports long-term pastoral planning. It’s been inspiring to see how data can meaningfully inform strategies to strengthen parish communities.”

Krishnamurthy’s teammate Ting-Yu Lin was tasked with analyzing parish registration data alongside data from the most recent U.S. Census to look for trends around engagement among 18–39-year-olds and how it has changed over time. With the team Lin also applied statistical models to identify key factors that can influence participation and how it compares across regions.

The skills acquired and honed doing this project—particularly around analyzing and making sense of all types of data—will be beneficial post-SU, says Krishnamurthy. “Collaborating with a non-technical stakeholder emphasized the need for clear storytelling through visualizations and presentations.”

“It was fulfilling to see how statistical evidence and clustering patterns could inform future ministry decisions, parish planning and engagement strategies,” says team member Surya Kailash Ramesh. “Collaborating with a mission-driven organization also made the project feel especially meaningful.”

In what ways do the students see their work on this project useful to their post-SU lives?

“This experience sharpened my ability to design end-to-end data solutions—from cleaning and integrating multi-source datasets to modeling, spatial mapping and presenting insights,” says Ramesh. “These skills are directly applicable in careers in data science, urban analytics, nonprofit consulting and public sector research.”

For Lin, one of the best parts of the project was being able to apply the tools and knowledge acquired in the classroom—from data cleaning to statistical modeling—to real data.

“It gave me a deeper understanding of how data science can be used to explore different fields and make a real impact,” says Lin.

Ultimately, the students will produce a report that will walk through the findings and highlight any trends they discover, particularly with how young people engage with the church.

“Working with the data science students has been really positive, a high level of analysis and thought to their work,” says Morgan from the archdiocese. “Our needs our being met and it’s been a really good experience. It’s a meaningful collaboration between the university and the archdiocese.”

Another benefit in working with students—a fresh perspective.

“It’s been a very productive partnership and very helpful to get their deeper insights,” says Morgan. “The students have been really proactive, diving into the data and doing so with fresh eyes.”

He continues: “One thing that we have been struck by is that because the students have the historical data, they have been able to look closely at where cultural communities worship at vs. where these communities actually are located geographically and how the arch has met people where they are at.”

For the second project for the Archdiocese of Seattle, a team of students worked with the Office for Catholic Schools within the archdiocese, looking at school vitality, in the context of the broader community, and trying to work out ways to shore up long-term sustainability of Catholic schools, says Nicholas Ford, superintendent of the Office for Catholic Schools.

The Archdiocese of Seattle oversees 74 Catholic schools across Western Washington, serving nearly 22,000 students—with a 99 percent high school graduation rate. While these institutions demonstrate remarkable strength, the Office for Catholic Schools engaged with the SU team to further enhance operational excellence.

What has been the most impressive part about working with these SU students? Says Ford, “It’s how fast they have come to grasp the overarching project, to be able to shift and adapt. We provided an abstract and they were able to say what is or isn’t possible. It’s been an interesting thing to watch.”

“They have not been constrained by the limits of our imagination,” adds Morgan.

Register for Projects Day—free and open to the public—today.

This is Part I of a two-part series spotlighting specific projects leading up to Projects Day on June 6.