Student Participation

student laser lab

Student Internships and Capstone Project Agreements

Supervising faculty and departments must follow certain guidelines when working with students on projects involving companies. 

  1. Define the academic outcomes expected from the interactions and their importance to the student’s programs. 
  2. Provide academic alternatives. This means that in any situation, such as a capstone class, the class should provide alternatives to working on company projects where the students are obligated to transfer ownership of intellectual property to the company. 
  3. In most situations, undergraduate students are not employees of the university nor does the university have any ownership or control over their intellectual property. Therefore, any rights the participating companies want are based upon agreements directly between them and each student working on their project. Each student must be free to make a choice regarding project participation or not. Companies will need to provide a simple agreement for students, and units decide if these are consistent with their conditions of access. Then students will need to decide whether to participate in a project under the term the company offers. 
  4. In the case of internships, students go to work at a company and may need to sign a form of employment agreement. Problems arise when the internships overlap with thesis or dissertation work. The best practice is to write, explicitly and in advance, a scope of work at the company so that the internship does not overlap with the graduate program. If there is an expectation that the internship contributes to the thesis or dissertation work, the student needs to access relevant data and retain the ability to publish the necessary elements of the work in the thesis or dissertation. It is important to note that in many cases, the internship work may be considered confidential and proprietary to the company. 

For more information, use the resources below, or contact Industry, Innovation, and Translation. 

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Managing Student Participation in Echelon: PI

IIT’s project management platform, Echelon: PI, can help innovators manage projects, including those in which students are participating. For more information, please see: