Partners - How It Works

A Carnegie Mellon student will come to your site for 3 hours each week to work with the leaders of your organization. The student will help guide you through a process to determine the underlying problems that technology can help you solve, and plan for sustainable solutions.

Throughout the semester, you and your student consultant will work together to increase your ability to utilize technology in order to meet your mission. By working in partnership, you not only develop a solution, you build capacity to sustain that solution once the student has completed the program course.

At the end of the semester, you and your student consultant will make a presentation at the Community Technology Forum.

Requirements

Caveats

  1. We do our best to ensure that students who sign up for the class are committed to completing the class, however, occasionally, a student ends up withdrawing from the class during the semester. Typically, this happens when a student has under estimated the time they need for this class. We do our best to advise students so this does not happen. When it does happen, there is nothing we can do except to invite the Community Partner to participate in the following semester.

  2. The semester is short and the student has to do a lot of work in a short amount of time. For this reason, it is critical that you keep your scheduled appointments, do the work you agree to do, and maintain communication with the student. The student will need your feedback on reports quickly, often the next day. When we get to the final consulting reports, we will need fast turnaround time from Community Partners because we also need to get the reports published in time for the Community Technology Forum.
  3. If there is any chance that you think you will not be able to follow through with the requirements of this partnership, please wait until such time as when you are able to do it. Since the Community Partner is the focus for the student's learning, it is essential that the partnership be sustained for the semester.