The Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project is designed for exceptional undergraduate students who are in their final year and are looking for a unique, challenging capstone design experience. Students in the MUCP:
- Apply knowledge, skills and processes from different disciplines to the analysis of a real-world problem;
- Demonstrate judgement as they integrate economic, environmental, social, and other pertinent interdisciplinary factors;
- Incorporate teamwork, project management, and direct stakeholder and client interactions into their work;
- Prove the feasibility of their solution
Student applications for the 2024/25 academic year are now closed. Applications for the 2025/26 year will open in Spring 2025.
Q&A Session (July 16, 2024)
Frequently Asked Questions
You are eligible to apply if you are scheduled to take a capstone course. The MUCP is a substitute course that you can take in place of your departmental capstone or independent thesis course.
The School of Cities puts out a call for a Statement of Need early in the year, inviting organizations and municipalities to apply.
The client is expected to provide support for 1-2 hours per week from September to March. This support includes timely access to any data that your team requires. The specific details and scope of the project are discussed in an initial meeting in September between the team members, faculty supervisor, and appropriate subject matter experts. Your team is also welcome to seek advice independently from faculty members known to you as experts.
Each student will work 10 hours per week for about 26 weeks. This includes attendance at six workshops hosted by the course supervisor.
The course assignments are designed to build towards achieving the course deliverables. The final deliverable will be a report that summarizes the research and investigation resulting from the multidisciplinary and mixed methods problem-solving approach. The following are the student deliverables:
- Project requirements: defines the background of the problem, frames the problem, and outlines the scope. The project requirement should clearly state what the students expect from the Community Parter, and the Community Partner’s expectations for the students.
- Review and critique: The team will present and defend their problem-solving proposal. This is an opportunity to receive feedback and critique from the community partners and supervisor(s), as well as additional direction.
- Showcase: Students will clearly present the problem and a robust solution to the community partners, supervisors and other students followed by a question and answer period.
- Final report and deliverable: The final report contains the complete problem-solving process from the definition of the problem to the implementation of the solution and the results of testing. It contains a discussion of the required future work in enough detail that the community partner can implement the solution.
No. You are invited to rank your interests as part of the application process, but the selection committee assigns the team, based on your rankings and the needs of the clients.