ABINGTON, Pa. — Penn State Abington information technology (IT) students developed an automated solution to a real-world challenge posed by a global biomedical research organization, gaining professional experience through a required capstone course that they can highlight in job interviews.
The chief information officer (CIO) at Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute wanted an off-boarding process for departing staff, and two student teams were tasked with defining the problem, ferreting out the project requirements, and finally reporting back to Wistar's staff.
“We learned how to manually use the components, which were SharePoint and Microsoft power platforms, and configure them to work together. It’s a lot of automation logic and taking various workflows to trigger emails or reminders,” said James Breeden, one of two student team leaders. “You’re data linking and maintaining data relationships across the different lists that need to be managed. We were building with tools that Microsoft provides, based on the automation flows that connect the different Microsoft components."
From an IT perspective, off boarding is broader than just removing people from systems. For example, human resources, IT and finance units have essential roles, but security builds access cards that need to be deactivated.
“We spent a lot of time parsing over the requirements that Wistar gave us and had to figure out exactly what we thought would be a satisfying potential solution. That was probably the most exciting part,” Breeden said.
Jeff Fahnoe, Wistar’s CIO, set specifications but trusted the student teams to develop their own approach.
“The students did a great job getting to the fundamental issues of offboarding. They leveraged the framework we gave them, which now allows us to further develop it,” he said.
Fahnoe’s prior experience in higher education led him to “see the value in students learning in a classroom setting as well as getting real world experience. The student teams got as much value out of the experience as we did.”
Richard Lang, assistant teaching professor of IT at Abington, and Fahnoe both previously worked in hospital and health system IT, and they connected to develop the capstone project. According to Lang, rigorous capstone projects prepare students to work in the highly competitive field by providing technical, project management and administrative experience.
“The students can take a problem from scratch, walk through the process of information systems development and come up with a prototype that will solve a problem for a company-that’s what people are going to hire them to do,” said Lang, who explained that he reached out to Fahnoe to propose the project and acted as the de facto CIO to the student teams. “In job interviews, students can speak to actual experience, how they helped a client, how they can help a company bring projects in on time and under budget, and meet or exceed stakeholder expectations because they just did that in the capstone course."
Capstone courses along with internships, faculty-led research, academic travel and leadership development provide students with the skills to launch from campus to career. Learn more about the Abington Experience, which provides students with a roadmap to success. The Wistar project also demonstrates the University’s land-grant mission in action, strengthening organizations and individuals across the Philadelphia region.
About Penn State Abington
Penn State Abington provides an affordable, accessible and high-impact education resulting in the success of a diverse student body. It is committed to student success through innovative approaches to 21st-century public higher education within a world-class research university. With more than 3,100 students, Penn State Abington is a residential campus that offers baccalaureate degrees in 26 majors, accelerated master's degrees, undergraduate research, the Schreyer Honors College, NCAA Division III athletics and more.