Partnering for Student Success

Grace O’Sullivan, Vice President of Corporate Engagement and Strategic Partnerships at ASU, explains how industry collaboration fuels student success. She shares how companies help shape curriculum design, mentor students, and bring real-world learning into the classroom. From capstone projects to guest lectures, Grace shows how ASU ensures graduates are career-ready.

So it's really key for our students to be engaging with industry leaders so they get a sense of what it's like to work in these careers and also the industry leaders tell us, you know, where can our curriculum be enhanced or go in a different direction to be more applicable.

The tactical ‘how’ can take many shapes. So for us, it can be simply, as you know, funding capstone projects. So they give us their problems for our students to build teams around and start building solutions for. They can come guest lecture to classes and give the students, you know, a real look behind the scenes and say, this is a day in the life of a blank semiconductor engineer or a physician.
 

So they also give us questions and projects to work on for research, so faculty members can engage all kinds of different students from different levels, undergraduates to PhD level students, to be working on these problems while they're in school.

And that's very valuable. And then also companies come engage with the university to also get new ideas. You know, how does Gen Z think about this certain process or product type. So we engage with them in so many ways. And again like the Co-lab, it's really about co-designing solutions that companies really appreciate from ASU.