M.Eng. Projects

One great way for industry partners to work directly with Cornell Engineering Masters students is through joint projects.

These projects can be tailored to jointly meet the needs of the company and the students. Your company gains answers to technical questions you may have and the students gain valuable insight into the types of questions industry asks and the processes used to find the answers.

In any sort of collaboration like this, there are necessary preliminary discussions and agreements about scope and ownership of resulting IP. These discussions are best had in person with representatives of the specific M.Eng. program involved.

We present the following information as a guide to determining which forms will be required before a project can begin.

The Dean (or Dean's designee) and the sponsor organization both sign the Student Participation Agreement. This agreement has 4 appendices:

  • Appendix A: Project description
  • Appendix B: Student Participation Affirmation (to be signed by student(s))
  • Appendix C: NDA (to be signed by the course instructor and/or student(s))
  • Appendix D: IP Agreement (to be signed by student(s))

Appendix A and Appendix B are required for all projects.

Appendix C is required IF Confidential Information (CI) is included in the project. The faculty member working with students on the project will sign the NDA. (If the sponsoring company manages the flow of information such that no confidential information is shared with the faculty member or students, then there is no need to sign an NDA for this project.)

If the faculty member that signs the NDA manages the Confidential Information so that no students have access to it, then the students do not need to sign the NDA. If, however, students DO have access to the CI involved in the project, then the students also need to sign the NDA.

If it is determined that a separate NDA and IP agreement are needed for students, then the sponsoring company and Cornell's Office of Sponsored Programs work together to prepare a separate NDA and/or IP agreement.

This same information is presented in the diagram below:

This image shows a flow chart focused on how to decide who needs to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The flow chart simply re-creates what is already spelled out in the text that comes before it on this webpage.

Contact Katherine Herleman (Executive Director of Innovation) or Kathryn Caggiano (Associate Dean of M.Eng. Programs) to find out more about the process of working with our M.Eng. students on a project your company helps to design.