Preparing for the Working World: Wistar Institute Serves Up Real-World IT Project for Penn State Abington Students

Richard Lang, Ed.D., assistant teaching professor in Penn State Abington’s Information Technology department, wants his students to gain real-life IT experience that will prepare them for work in this competitive sector. One of his students, James Breeden, led one of two, six-person teams as part of Penn State Abington’s capstone project, helping to develop an automated solution to a Wistar IT project. Here’s their story.

How did you get involved in capstone projects?

Richard Lang: I teach information technology and cyber security, and that includes the process around project management systems. The capstone course is the culmination of all the courses students take during their Penn State experience, and it applies what they’ve learned to a real-life, real-world project.

To oversee IT for any organization these days, you need to understand the different facets of cybersecurity so you can lead the effort of protecting the organization. You also need a great team. In this course, I teach our students how to prepare an organization to respond to an incident, how to plan for it before it happens, and if it happens, how to keep the organization resilient and recover quickly. But I also teach them to work as a team.

Tell me about this project. What was the problem that needed to be solved and how did the students set out to accomplish this?

Richard Lang: I spoke with The Wistar Institute’s IT team, comprising CIO Jeff Fahnoe and helpdesk supervisor Adam Weiss, about creating a capstone project. They were interested in our students designing an off-boarding process for departing staff and trainees. To be a capstone project, it must be rigorous and challenging enough to take students through a 15–16-week course.

James Breeden, capstone student team leader:

It was nice to design a real-world solution for an external organization because it made it a lot more meaningful and impactful. Our task was designing an off-boarding process, and just having the opportunity to transform something that’s critical and could possibly be implemented was what appealed to me.

The Wistar team presented the problem, and our two student teams were tasked with walking through the problem, defining it, ferreting out the project requirements, and then reporting back to the Wistar team to see If we missed anything.

Richard Lang: The final exam is the student presentations to the Wistar team. It’s a real-world project and I try to manage it as if I were CIO and the students are the folks who work for me in the industry.

James Breeden: Off-boarding from an IT perspective, is more than taking people out of the system; you must consider each department that could have a role. For instance, HR, IT and finance departments have essential roles with a lot of communication involved, yet the security department builds the access cards that need to be deactivated. So there are so many players to consider.

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 of the capstone course.

How did you create solutions?

James Breeden: You are learning how to manually use the components (SharePoint and Microsoft power platform in this case) that are provided and configure them to work together. You must set each step up. It’s a lot of automation logic and taking various workflows to trigger emails or reminders. You’re also data linking and maintaining data relationships across the different lists that need to be managed. We aren’t coding. We are building with tools that Microsoft provides, based on the automation flows that connect the different Microsoft components.

What’s the biggest course takeaway?

Richard Lang: After completing the capstone course, they all have the confidence to take a problem from scratch and walk through the entire tried-and-true process of information systems development and come up with a prototype that will solve a problem for a company—because that’s what people are going to hire them to do. They have experience working on the administrative and project management side as well as the technical side. So, when they start job interviews, they 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.

Why was the capstone course important for Wistar?

Jeff Fahnoe, Wistar Institute CIO:
I come from an education background and 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. We set the project specifications and gave them the freedom from the get-go to approach the project however they wished. And 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.

About Penn State Abington

Penn State Abington offers an affordable, accessible, and high-impact education for 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 about 3,000 students, Penn State Abington’s residential campus close to Philadelphia offers bachelor’s degrees in 26 majors, undergraduate research, the Schreyer Honors College, NCAA Division III athletics, and more.