Mentoring Capstone Project

After Occupy Wall Street protest movement and their explicit statement about lack of jobs for fresh graduates i was curious to understand why USA so heavily depend on foreign graduate workers - H1B visa holders. Casual conversations led slowly to some understanding of Education Reform in USA, and most interesting specific field - STEM - stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Locally at Knoxville, TN i got minimal exposure to 2 programs: STEMspark and STEM/NOVA Award at Boy Scouts of America. Both programs focused on middle and high school students.

So naturally interesting was participation as mentor at TNAchives to learn about how things are with school graduates willing to earn college degree. Learned interesting statistics that in USA college graduate versus non-college graduate makes $1 million dollar more in employment lifetime.
  
Next opportunity to understand the education to employment gap presented this year when co-worker, graduate of Pellissippi State Community College, asked if our company has idea and will to mentor Capstone Project for under-graduate students. We agreed with idea to build intrapreneurship web portal - Idea Management System. Capstone experience was so good that company later invited one team member for summer internship. By end of internship our intern had series of interviews lined up... 

But most eye revealing was presentation of Capstone projects last spring, there were only half-dozens companies willing to devote time to mentor Capstone project.


Finally i found the bottleneck in supply chain of skilled workers in STEM field - shortage of volunteers willing to share their practical knowledge with under-graduates and mentoring them through the Capstone process.

If this shortage is common, and considering that i live in Volunteer State i do believe it is, then introducing tax benefit for companies willing to participate in Capstone - Internship - Employment pathway for new graduates from US colleges may be just that incentive that improves employment rate in USA. And also contributes to chain effect of building Culture of Giving Back - one of key component of economic sustainability of any country.

best regards,
Roman Havrylyak

12/4/2013