MITS Students Turn Technical Expertise into Real-World Impact
By Lindsay Marcellus
As rapid technological advancement redefines every major industry, the challenge shifts to bridging deep technical expertise with the ability to communicate how to develop and use these innovations strategically. Students in 黑料专区's multidisciplinary Master of Information Technology Strategy (MITS) program address this gap by partnering with companies, nonprofits, or educational organizations on a project that translates organizational needs into realized capability.
Administered by the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology (CMIST), the MITS program culminates in a semester-long capstone project in which students work in teams to develop solutions for specific challenges identified by their project sponsors. “The capstone project is a learning laboratory at the intersection of things learned in the classroom and those things that can only be learned by lived experience,” says Matthew Butkovic, a lecturer at CMIST who also serves as a technical advisor to students through the capstone seminar.
With its emphasis on creating a useful product, the capstone is a natural extension of MITS coursework, which is largely constructed around project-based learning, said CMIST Graduate Program Manager Mark Gardner. In his role, Gardner helps students frame their capstone seminar for future job opportunities as well as develop their communication skills. For example, when John Pan completed his capstone project in fall 2025, he was already experienced in applying insights from data science, software engineering, and cybersecurity to real-world settings. While taking a course on machine learning in production, he worked on a team to build and train a production-ready ML service ahead of his December graduation. “The capstone was an even more ambitious practicum with training wheels removed,” said Pan, reflecting on his experience developing an artificial intelligence (AI) enforcement gateway to secure data for Virtru, a Washington, DC-based security firm.
While students in the capstone meet regularly with a project mentor from their sponsoring organization and participate in a weekly seminar currently co-taught by Butkovic and Gardner, capstone teams have considerable autonomy to negotiate project deliverables and scope. After pivoting from their initial focus to address a critical gap in AI data security, Pan and his team developed a Modern Context Protocol (MCP) server to intercept AI requests, enforce entitlements, and ensure that sensitive data was decrypted and shared in compliance with defined policies.
Pan credits his team’s success in part to the self-driven structure of the capstone project, which allowed them to take risks, change direction quickly, and respond to emerging challenges. “Navigating uncertainty is an invaluable skill in our new era of technology,” he said, adding that the capstone showed him how to approach uncertainty with ambition instead of fear.
While Pan's team focused on AI security for a national firm, other students applied their technical skills to local challenges faced by community organizations. Last fall, MITS alumna Yishan Wang and her capstone team worked with the nonprofit Bike Share Pittsburgh Inc, which operates the POGOH system of bikes and docking stations city-wide. For Wang, the highlight of the project was the opportunity to “work on real-world problems that would have a palpable impact” on her local community. To help the organization better manage its “valeted bikes,” a flexible set of bikes used to balance temporary fluctuations in station demand, Wang’s team helped improve the prototype of the staff-facing phone app and webpage. Through data cleaning and new metrics like “tether-hours,” the students utilized live data to inform decisions about bike distribution, while also drawing on the skills learned in their coursework to improve the overall security and stability of the system.
Applying her technical expertise to benefit her local community was fulfilling. “Now, when I pass by a POGOH station, I feel proud that I’ve done something that might have helped improve the experience of POGOH bike users,” shared Wang.
Cognizant of the time and trust that project sponsors invest in student teams, faculty say the capstone is designed to teach students how to deliver practical, sustainable solutions. Since MITS students bring strong technical expertise to the table, a unique challenge that can arise is ensuring that the proposed solution aligns well with a partner organization's day-to-day operations and resources. “A technically exquisite solution delivered in an unsustainable form is not the objective,” Butkovic said. He noted that MITS students don't simply hand over a complex, hard-to-manage system—they deliver tools that the organization can actually use. “This type of transition isn’t easy and doing it well is an important skill for anyone working in a technical profession,” he added.
The MITS program is intentionally designed as a professionally-oriented master’s program, with the capstone project providing students the chance to develop “soft skills,” such as communicating why their advanced skillset and technical abilities are valuable. Gardner has mentored many students as they find success in their ability to manage client expectations, negotiate project scope, and align a project’s technical outputs with their client’s needs. “Project sponsors have uniformly commented on how well MITS students perform in a self-organized manner and are equally impressed with the project outputs that students spend a semester working on,” said Gardner. He noted that these client connections often turn into strong networking contacts and referrals for students on the job market after graduation.
MITS students graduate from CMU ready to take on new challenges—equipped with the technical, analytical, and interpersonal skills honed through project-based coursework and their capstone experiences. After finishing the MITS program, Pan returned to the United States Air Force, where he currently serves in a cybersecurity role. Inspired by CMU’s culture of builders, he has also created . This product, which automatically formats complex documents, has already saved an estimated 3,644 hours, which can now be dedicated to higher-impact tasks, such as fixing planes or defending networks. As his team continuously balances diverse customer needs, competing stakeholders, and challenging technical issues, Pan notes that the MITS program’s cross-domain foundation prepared him well for navigating uncertainty. “The program doesn’t hand you a playbook,” he said. Gardner agrees. After successfully completing the MITS program, graduates are ready to write their own.
Photos:
Image 1: MITS students who presented their Capstone projects in December 2025 pose for a group picture; Image 2, left to right: Mark Gardner, CMIST Graduate Program Manager and Matthew Butkovic CMIST lecturer who serves as a technical advisor to students in the capstone seminar; Image 3 l to r: Nick Hamby, Nico Bitetto, John Pan; Image 4, left to right in back: Yongzhi Zhao, Jiaxin Hua, Yichen Zhang and Yishan Wang at the podium (Not Pictured: Changyi Xin); Image 5: Yifei Huang, Jiapei Chen, Wilson Lee, and Yuna Wang present their project “AI Agent Risk Identification Framework,” sponsored by LMI Advanced Technology Solutions, LLC
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and those quoted here and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the US Government.
More on the article's capstone projects:
John Pan worked with Niccolò Bitetto and Nicholas Hamby on a project titled “Zero Trust AI Agents Through a Model Context Protocol Server” for Virtru. Yishan Wang collaborated with Jiaxin Hua, Changyi Xin, Yichen Zhang, and Yongzhi Zhao on the project “Internal Operations Meteor Dashboard Upgrade” for Bike Share Pittsburgh Inc (POGOH). Visit the MITS webpage to learn more about the MITS Capstone and to view past projects.