Suhaib Ahmad Siddiqui thought he was helping solve a simple problem.
Sport Sitters, a startup that connects families with college athletes for childcare, needed an easier way to notify athletes when they had been approved to work through the platform. Siddiqui is an undergraduate computer science student in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. He and his teammates were working on the app through their capstone project, and automation seemed like the right fix.
Then the email went out.
Not to one athlete. Not to a small test group. To everyone in the database.
The mistake cost the company about $70 in extra email charges. More importantly, it showed the students what it means to work for a business on software that people are already using. Sport Sitters was not a mock app built for a grade. It was a live platform for a business with real users, real payments, real babysitters and real families depending on it.
“After that, we realized we were dealing with a lot more than school requirements and grades,” Siddiqui says. “There was money involved, and people’s lives were affected.”
Through the capstone program, led by Fulton Schools Associate Teaching Professor Steven Osburn, students work with industry partners on practical problems. The structure gives companies a way to collaborate with emerging engineers while giving students something difficult to recreate in a classroom: responsibility to stakeholders.
That exchange is what drew Sport Sitters founder Meaghan Franks to the program.
“I realized, wait a minute, we’re right next to this incredible school of engineering with so much talent,” Franks says. “How could I not give these students, who have so much drive and curiosity, the kind of real-world opportunity they can put on their resumes?”