Student-alumni mentoring in the business capstone: An opportunity to both cap and bridge the undergraduate experience

Abstract

At its best, the undergraduate capstone class in the college of business can both cap the students’ learning experience and bridge that experience to their future careers. Recent trends in management education, however, have seen the capstone course evolve to consist primarily of a terminal group project without any focus on professional application. This research describe an innovative student-alumni mentorship program that attempts to provide both a capping and bridging experience for students. The instructor follows best practices in developing and implementing the program, and the results from a postmentoring survey demonstrate the efficacy of achieving the program’s stated objectives.

Keywords:

• Business capstone
• mentoring
• student-alumni mentoring

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the interlibrary loan staff at Cowles Library, Drake University, for their excellent assistance in procuring additional references for this article. They would also like to thank Noah Marsh for his assistance with the quantitative analysis of the free-response comments. The instructor of the course would like to thank the 11 students who gave of their time and expertise to give back to our university.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.