Capstone
Your capstone will be a deep dive into experiential learning consisting of two components— a creative research project and participation in our culture points program. In your senior year, you’ll work to determine what your project will be. By Block 6, you’ll begin working on your project. There is no better preparation for your future career than an immersive research project.
A few recent capstone projects included:
- Principal Component Analysis: A Brief Tutorial
- An Introduction to Homotopy
- A Model for Predicting the NCAA Basketball Tournament
- Fubini’s Theorem and General Measure Theory
- Predicting West Nile Virus in California Using Machine Learning
The second component of your capstone can begin as early as your first year on campus. In fact, you can start earning points even before you declare your major. You’ll earn what we call culture points simply by participating in specific activities or tasks. Your end goal is to earn 30 culture points. We recommend you knock off ⅓ of those points quickly by taking the sophomore exam. It covers material you’ll have to know anyway for future classes. Think of it as a challenge that we’re confident you can take on.
And if you do the math, 30 points over four years isn’t a deep commitment. You’re looking at an hour of your time per block participating in activities and tasks that you’d probably do anyway as someone interested in mathematics or statistics. The real challenge is, how quickly can you get them done?