When Seth Dowling began teaching the capstone course for DePaul’s MS in Business Analytics (MSBA) program, the Double Demon’s 20+ years of experience in operations and strategy informed his approach.
“How do you create high-functioning, high-impact, autonomous teams? How do students self-organize? And how do you pull it all together in 10 weeks? ”
These, Dowling said, are the kinds of questions he focuses on when he teaches capstone.
Each quarter, the MSBA program partners with different companies for the capstone: the final class in the MSBA experience. Companies bring strategically critical data problems to the table. Students develop solutions using all of the analytical skills and business acumen they’ve gained over the course of their degree.
By bridging the gap between academia and industry, students gain invaluable, hands-on experience. Company partners, in turn, benefit from an expert, outsider perspective.
The result feels less like a classroom and more like a small consulting firm in action.
Project hones leadership skills
Typically, the capstone class splits into teams of 4-5 students each to tackle this challenge. Final presentations are part client pitch, part friendly competition.
But last fall, in Dowling’s class, two teams decided to do things differently.
It was week eight of the 10-week term. Because projects involve real-world data and real-life clients, the process can often be nonlinear. By week eight, the best path forward to an actionable solution had only just become clear.
Team leaders Manal Fatima and Disha Sheth saw this challenge as an opportunity to join forces. In Dowling’s words, they “lobbied” him to do so (using many of the same skills they would later leverage in presenting their solution to the client).
The resulting team of eight students was bigger than most teams in workplaces, let alone in classrooms. Managing it required Fatima and Sheth to draw on their leadership skills more than ever.
“One of the main things I learned was definitely delegation,” Sheth reflected. “I’m usually a Type A person. This helped me learn that I don't have to be in control. We can delegate; we can use all of our strengths.”
“I don’t think this would have been possible if any one of us was not passionate about the project,” added Fatima. “We were all trying really hard to make it work. It was truly a team effort.”
Data analysis delivers business value
The brief for Fatima, Sheth, and their classmates went like this:
Labelmaster, a Chicago-based company, creates custom labels and packaging for clients who ship hazardous goods. Think hazmat or shipping labels that require navigating a thorny tangle of national and international regulations.
Labelmaster wanted a way to sort incoming clients into groups for marketing processes. The company shared a vast trove of customer data with students.
The students’ task: use that data to craft an algorithm that would sort new and prospective clients into groups based on the characteristics of existing client types.
The task involved parsing vast amounts of data. It also involved deciding what to do with fields that were incomplete or coded inconsistently — decisions that often had to be made on a case-by-case basis.
Most of all, students were tasked with building a product that Labelmaster could use to focus its marketing efforts.
Fatima, Sheth, and their teams didn't just build a sophisticated model. They also built an interface between that model and the CRM system Labelmaster’s marketers use in their day-to-day work.
“We really thought about their business perspective,” said Fatima. “We wanted to take that extra step for them.”
Indeed, the team didn’t just build a product that integrated smoothly into Labelmaster’s workflow. They also built a model that aligned closely to paid persona research the company had previously undertaken, reaffirming Labelmaster’s business strategy.
“The DePaul output matches the paid persona research study extremely well,” wrote Manuel Fuentes, Director of Marketing, Pricing, and Business Analytics for Labelmaster. “And students worked day and night to deliver this outstanding classification algorithm.”
Real-world experience shapes students’ career aspirations
The collaboration with Labelmaster, which began in spring 2025, is ongoing. Labelmaster is just one of many companies the program partners with on a regular basis. Others include Morningstar and Reyes Holdings.
“We would love to see more Chicago-based companies participate in this initiative,” said Khadija Ali Vakeel, co-director of the MSBA program. “When organizations share real challenges and real data, our students gain invaluable experience — and companies gain fresh, data-driven perspectives. The messier the data, the greater the opportunity for transformation.”
For Sheth, Fatima, and the rest of the fall 2025 capstone class, the real-world stakes of the project helped it stand out as a signature educational experience.
“It’s about taking responsibility at the end of the day, even though no one [explicitly] hands that responsibility over to you,” Fatima said.
With real-world project management experience under their belt, both Fatima and Sheth see a future in project management roles.
For Fatima, project management is about having a sense of direction.
“I think it’s walking in with a mission of getting something done,” she said. “It’s not that you’re perfect; it’s that you learn a lot from the process. It’s demanding. It’s challenge-based.”
“I think it’s genuinely the problem-solving,” Sheth agreed. “After graduation, we’re not going to be forced to learn something new. So it keeps you on the move. It keeps you learning new skills.”
For Dowling, too, the class is an opportunity for continuous improvement.
“It’s an experiment every quarter,” he said. “Think of it as a puzzle: a fast-moving organizational challenge where strategy, execution, and project management all have to come together in a compressed timeline to create tangible business value. Why wouldn’t you want that immersive experience? Why wouldn’t you want to be at DePaul to prepare for the real world?”