What was Your Senior Project? 82
Caydel asks: "I am a third year CS major. This year I have a two-semester senior project course in which I can spend two semesters on a project of my choosing. I want to write something very cool, which at the same time provides quite a challenge to me, and serves a useful purpose; however, I am having trouble coming up with good ideas. For those of you out there who have done a similar course, what did you do? What would you have done differently? Which languages did you use? How many skills, that came from outside of your CS courses, did you use?"
Oooh. (Score:5, Funny)
You could even make a version for employees that shows them what the going rate of their work is elsewhere in the world so that they can begin to plan accordingly and start drinking that free(ish) water rather than that $4/gallon milk. Or start walking 50 miles to work instead of spending a week's salary on a day's worth of gas. Or start wearing yard trash bags instead of clothes. You know - to make the average American worker more competitive with the global labor force.
Or even better, you could build on existing TTS (text to speech) libraries by creating a utility that will modify input so that it sounds more twangish or nasal or laid back. That way call centers overseas could connect these to their PBX systems so their engineers sound more "American" to american end-users looking for tech support.
But perhaps you want to make something that will actually help *you* in the long run. In that case, perhaps you could develop some sort of program that will let you travel back in time to pick another major for a career that isn't so washed-out. I'm not sure what sort of schooling is available for janitorial work, but I'm sure there are vocational training centers you could look into!
Re:Oooh. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Oooh. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Oooh. (Score:1)
Re:Oooh. (Score:1)
I dropped out of the 9th grade.
I had an 8th grade GPA of 0.13 (yes, that's possible).
I just had my 5 year anniversary with my current employer.
Re:Oooh. (Score:4, Funny)
I just had my 5 year anniversary with my current employer.
Carl's Jr. [carlsjr.com]?
Re:Oooh. (Score:1)
Re:Oooh. (Score:1)
Re:Oooh. (Score:5, Funny)
Finally (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally (Score:1)
well done sir
Open source... recreate one that is sloppy (Score:5, Interesting)
FYI it doesn't have to be a web app either... lots of standalone applications out there too but of course if it can publish reports, logs and status to a web monitor app even better.
Re:Open source... recreate one that is sloppy (Score:2)
For example, a financial calculator. It's not to hard to find the functions you'd need to use and you can meet (network) with some people in the Business School and have them assist you (generally professors are pretty nice). Tell them you are considering an MBA at your school, that might help too.
Another example is economic models, or some bi
Re:Open source... recreate one that is sloppy (Score:3, Insightful)
Or better yet, assuming you keep all rights to the code, program something that takes another area of expertise and create a program to make someone elses life easier.
In other words, ask for ideas from people who work in less-technical fields. See where the power of computing can help people's task, people who aren't technical enough to write their own programs. Economics is always a rich source of ideas.
One problem (Score:1)
There isn't a senior CS major alive that can write elegant code. When I was a senior I thought my code was a thing of beauty. When I look at it now, years later, I shudder in disbelief that such crap ever eminated from my fingertips.
Also, any /.er who claims to have written elegant code during college is either lying or delusional.
Re:One problem (Score:2)
well, true as it is, I think setting the goal high could be a great learning experience for the lad if nothing else... and remember that there are a hell of a lot more resources for learning how to code well these days. Look at the O'Reilly series for instance, did they exist back when you were in school? Not that they are the end all of coding but better than standard issue textbooks I think.
The focus of the suggestion however was implied not explicit...
Just Ask (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just Ask (Score:2)
Re:Just Ask (Score:2)
Summer of Code Ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
Retink your requirements (Score:5, Interesting)
If you project can end up being open source, that's a nice bonus, but it can be a mixed blessing. Believe me, 5 years from now when you've learned how little you knew when you graduated it will be awfully uncomfortable to explain during a job interview why you implemented that code the way you did.
Above all though, don't work on something with no obvious practical applications unless your goal is to get into grad school. A practical project will make you desireable to hiring companies in the same way past job experience would.
Re:Retink your requirements (Score:2)
For my senior project I wrote a Linux device driver for the Emulex LP7000 based Fiber Channel HBAs. The project was paid for by Clariion (EMC for the last 3 months). The development we did was open source, but it became the basis for the closed emulex driver.
With that on my resume, I got a job writing linux device drivers a month before graduation, and have been hacking linux for cash ever since.
Re:Retink your requirements (Score:2)
> when you graduated it will be awfully uncomfortable to explain during
> a job interview why you implemented that code the way you did.
Meh.
Most interviewers would be interested in hearing what you'd do differently. Expecting brilliance from someone's senior project is lame.
Re:Retink your requirements (Score:2)
My experience has been that most interviewers are terrible. You have to sit through quite a few before you find a good place to work though. Some questions, the worst kind, reflect the interviewer's predetermined conclusions. Even if the rest of the interview hasn't sold you on the position, there's something uncomfortable about sitting across from a guy who's made up his mi
Hope You Like Access! (Score:2)
I had plenty of stuff on my resume by fourth year and aspirations of grad school, so I figured I could afford to do a project that wouldn't include soul-sucking
create a relational database (Score:4, Interesting)
Please. Somebody do this. Anybody. I have searched high and low and have found exactly 3 products. Two half-finished open source implementations, and Dataphor which is commercial and thus not worth using.
I'm seriously thinking of going back to school just so I can study databases and learn how to write one. I have written a couple attempts in Lisp and Ruby and I just don't have the brains to finish them.
Re:create a relational database (Score:1)
(Ok, so one still interface pg with SQL, but the other items on your list checks off)
Re:create a relational database (Score:2)
Compiler and Network (Score:4, Interesting)
My graduate project (c. 1984) was the development of a very low cost CSMA/CD system and network drivers for TSC/Flex. Hardware costs of $50/node were achieved when ethernet interfaces ran around $1000. Of course 125 Kb/s wasn't much, but in those days, it was impressive. Processing was purely interrupt-driven (no DMA), and the novelty was being able to mask the network controller interrupts for the right length of time once it was determined the packet was destined for someone else (or not grin).
The development system for the latter sported a 10 MB hard disk, as opposed to the usual 8" floppy-based systems -- I had written the hard disk drivers for that system in my final undergrad year: having a working HD-based TSC/Flex system was essential to the last course I needed to graduate and it was in danger of not being available, the course cancelled, and me having to wait a semester, so I did what was necessary to make the systems that were required for the course I had to take to teach me how to make such systems so that I might graduate when I expected.
I guess times have changed.
Good advice (Score:5, Informative)
For my senior project as an electrical engineer, I built what was just about an Apple IIe from the ground up. I designed the entire MC6502 microprocessor in VHDL, broke it up into component pieces and programmed them into different CPLDs, wired it all together with a RAM, a ROM, and a few serial controllers to take inputs from a keyboard and send outputs to a monitor, and wrote some simple demonstration software for it. I got an A
Another kid in my class hooked up an infraed sensor to a relay, and configured it so when you stand under a ceiling fan, it turns on, and when you walk away it turns off. He got an A, too.
The other kid was smart. I was dumb.
Remember, after you get your first job, no boss will ever care again, ever, what you did in college.
Re:Good advice (Score:3, Insightful)
The other kid's job will be offshored.
I think you were smart.
Re:Good advice (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if your immediate boss understands the question (mine at the moment would, and you cannot imagine how happy that makes me), he in turn has any important decisions handed down based on buzzword-worthiness.
My favorite, ever (fortunately a friend, not myself, had this disaster as a task) - The customer wanted something vaguely like a POS terminal. They specified the hardware platform, and that we needed to code everything in C++. I don't know if the customer actually had a clue what "C++" meant beyond a buzzword at the time, but suffice it to say, no C++ compiler existed for the specified target platform.
Kids - Your senior project doesn't matter. Your school's reputation (assuming something better than "Bill's house of Diplomas") doesn't matter. The opinions of your professors don't matter. No one cares how much "community service"/"volunteer work"/ "social BS" you performed. Do the least work possible to pass - I wouldn't even say worry about getting an "A" unless you already have highest-honors status and a B would lower that. And as the GP pointed out, once you get your first job, no one will ever care about your college work as more than idle conversation over beers while commiserating about the Dilbertian nature of "real" work... And even your first job doesn't care what you did in college - If you worked at a decent intership, your experience there for a total of 12 months out of the previous four years, will count for FAR more than the 36 months of academic work you did in the same time.
You want to know what does matter? Get the framed piece of paper to wave (doesn't matter what it actually says), and don't let yourself get into too much debt - Many employers now run credit checks on job applicants, meaning the schmuck who went $100k+ into debt at a private school and "wasted" his summers sucking up to professors will get turned down in favor of the guy who went to a state university and managed to pay tuition with the wages from a summer internship.
And I say this as someone who did keep a high GPA, in two different degrees, worked with professors on their pet research, and ended up with glowing, obviously-personal (rather than cookie-cutter) recommendations from two separate department chairs. Fortunately I also went to a state university and kept out of debt. And what mattered, for my first post-college job? The summer internship. No one, in any of the interviews I've endured (and yes, "endured" makes the right word to describe the process of inverviewing), cared in the least about the (IMO) very cool research I did in college. They cared that I knew X, Y, and Z (where X, Y, and Z frequently had no actual relation to the job description), that I could solve riddles quickly, that I passed a background check, and how I dealt with my worst failure at work (a tough question, considering that I never really failed by my own faults, and saying "management made the project physically impossible" sounds like a cop-out).
As one last point, to give all you poor bastards about to graduate a small sliver of hope that you haven't just wasted four years of your life - My current job violates most of the above complaints, but I consider it pretty much a one-in-a-million position. I interviewed directly with a real, live, competent engineer, who cared more about my skills than about mind games and buzzwords. Management has a decent knowledge of technology, but also the wisdom not to pretend they know enough to micromanage the IT department. I can speak with the head honcho casually, on a first-name basis, and don't find my desk contents waiting at security in a cardboard box for me when I come in the next morning. So such jobs exist, but good luck finding them.
Re:Good advice (Score:2)
Yet you haven't held one million positions yet, so you don't really know. Maybe it's more line one-in-twenty, or one-in-a-hundred. I work for a sucky dilbertian employer, but your description of the industry almost my job sound like paradise.
Excellent advice. See "the cost of an A" (Score:4, Interesting)
The effort required for a 'B' was much, much less - often just going to class and doing assignments on time - this let me take all the effort I would have wasted getting an A, and pour it into working at internships, my own learning, and contracts - gaining real world, resume-stuffing experience.
That said, I busted my ass on my senior project and learned a LOT about wireless and packet-level IP communications - that and all the C++ experience I learned got me a very nice job when I graduated. Later, all the experience with embedded systems (learned from hacking on my car, NOT my degree), C++ and graphics paid off in spades and let me start my own company.
The degree was very valuable though - I learned enough about fourier transforms and calculus to study and read papers that helped me a lot when setting up my company. Did it matter that I got 10/10 of the complex integrals right in that fourier transforms class? Nope. All that mattered was I knew what they were, how they could be used, and what their limitations were.
I'm sure there's lots of counter examples, but almost all of it goes to: If you're motivated, you'll (probably) succeed.
Do something that interests you on your senior project, and make sure it works at the end. Regardless of grade, you'll have made out better than most of your classmates.
As someone who has interviewed graduates ... (Score:2)
I'm interested in your final project, merely as a conversation starter and as chance to get you talking so I can see what your communication skills are like. I'm much more interested in your attitude, communication skills, willingness and enthusiasm to learn, and extra-curicular activities. This is what distinguishes people from the masses, n
Development of Fiji (Score:2)
Music (Score:3, Interesting)
My senior project way back in '03 was to use genetic algorithms to figure out what musical scale/mode sounded the best to people. Two scales were chosen from the pool. A Java applet generated notes in the scale based on the likelihood that a given interval would happen in popular music. Then the scales were given names like Ludwig Van Nirvana and their generated songs were pitted against each other. The listener voted on the best one, and after the entire pool was tested, the winners made sweet love (genetic algorithm style) and the losers died till they were dead. Long story short - the blues scale won.
I actually had much higher aspirations for the project before the end. I had to whittle it down to just scales because I needed something that could easily be represented as a bit string (in this case, 12 bits determining whether a given tone was part of the scale). I really wanted to generate good, listenable music based entirely on votes from live bodies. It could be done in this way, but you'd have to bring in many other aspects of music to get there (rhythm, tempo, timbre, range, and (shudder) harmony for example). You could do the exact same process with each of these separately, or combine them where practical. I would certainly be willing to provide my code to anyone who wanted to try.
Re:Music (Score:2)
Re:Music (Score:1)
> of music to get there (rhythm, tempo, timbre, range, and (shudder) harmony
> for example).
Forget harmony. Really, forget it. Real music doesn't *need* harmony, because *real* music has counterpoint. Harmony is just a cheap immitation. Music that's really worth listening to has counterpoint.
I am not convinced that a computer could write the really good stuff, but you could try it. It'd be a good hobby / spare time pro
Re: (Score:1)
suggestions, you say? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) a non-sucky plotting interface (there are some packages which claim to do just this, but i can't get bloody VTK to compile, so they're basically useless)
2) an optimization engine for octave
3)
4)
all of these projects demonstrate several key skills: good c++, good matlab, and the fundamentals of engineering with existing code.
other suggestions:
5) something like mtl (matrix template library, c++ code which uses expression templates and what not to try to help the compiler produce optimized code) that doesn't suck (their lu factorization produced plain
6) fix gnu's binutils so that they can use libraries generated by VC++
7) an optimized c++ toolkit for developing digital video processing and computer vision software under linux. i envision this as a kind of directshow lite --- you'd supply standard interfaces and a set of plugins providing basic transforms (color space conversions, for example), thread pools, and a nice gui to edit processing graphs and run them
incidentally, most of these things have been on my todo list for a long time. i think i'm going to crack at least the image reading and display portion of #4 over labor day weekend.
Algorithmic Music Composition (Score:3, Informative)
Research involved dealing with music theory, AI, midi, and several languages, including neural networks and ArtIM.
Lots of fun, very stressful waiting for uncertain results, and in the end, I met with limited success, but learned a lot and impressed my professor with my ability to bring multiple ideas and techniques to bear on a problem.
Senior AI Project (Score:5, Interesting)
After one of the Expert System lectures I asked Professor Arlan DeKock whether Expert Systems didn't seem a little bit too much like more sophisticated if-then-else branching systems, perhaps with a bit of if-then-else-maybe thrown in. He considered that for a little while and asked what I'd rather be working on. I said Natural Language Processing. Perhaps something like Zork.
He said, "Well, isn't that just a slightly more sophisticated version of a compiler?" He had me a little bit, but I was willing to give it a shot. He told me I'd never finish it by the end of the semester. That sounded like a challenge, so I took him up on it.
I did a ton of research on NL parsing and imperative command processing and eventually learned a ton about linguistics, Zork, object-oriented programming and AST parsing in LISP. A fantastic adventure. (Thank you Messrs. Winston and Horn)
As to when I finished, well, believe it or not I actually had a minimal space adventure coded and tested and ready to demo for Dr. DeKock 3 minutes before it was time. Of course, my other studies took a *slight* hit. 8-)
The really crazy thing was that the good Doctor was getting into and playing the adventure. One of the puzzles in the adventure prevented you from leaving a room until you gave a can of oil to a robot. He would block your way to the exit otherwise. Rather than solving the puzzle the inteded way, the professor picked up the robot and put him in his backpack. I didn't take physics into account and my adventure let him do that. He then exited the room and the robot could do nothing. The game / adventure actually let him do that and handled it properly.
I was a little dismayed that the *user* won by doing something I hadn't expected, but I was thrilled that my system was logically processing a world that in a moderately sophisticated way.
I got an A.
Then I got some sleep.
Re:Senior AI Project (Score:2)
You poor, poor soul. ;)
- Fellow UMR alumn
Re:Senior AI Project (Score:1)
Re:Senior AI Project (Score:3, Insightful)
I've always missed the sort of thought that went into those command line games. Clicking the "use" button while facing an object isn't the same. Are you supposed to open it, take it, break it, or turn
Which senior year? (Score:2)
Distributed make (Score:2)
Dear Slashdot, (Score:5, Funny)
I made a chicken enchiladas... (Score:5, Funny)
Oops, I'm sorry -- that was my señor project.
Re:I made a chicken enchiladas... (Score:1)
She got pregnant because of it.
(say it out loud, 'mer'cans)
I tried something cool and useful. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
I spent the whole year programming until 2 or 3AM every night, and then I'd get up at 6 or 7 the next morning. For a whole damn year. I still barely finished the project in time to graduate. If I hadn't had the wherewithall to make a schedule for the year and start staying up late the moment I realized how tight my very first deadline was, I probably wouldn't have had a chance.
The other kids who did boring crap (like tooling around with feedforward neural networks and producing graphs about convergence time versus various properties of the network's topology) graduated with good grades, too. And they slept more, didn't hate their lives, and got to go out drinking with their friends. Me? I pretty much wasted my entire senior year on that damn project.
Pick something that's not too ambitious. I recommend something that involves modifying existing software, and something that you can easily scale up should you prove to have more time to work on it. It's much harder to go the other way should you find you're running out of time, and there's no guarantee your professors will give you an "A for effort" should you fail to complete the project.
You should spend your senior year hanging out with your friends on the last year you'll all be together, not rotting in front of some computer terminal. You've got the rest of your life to make OCR software and write optimizing compilers and such.
Re:I tried something cool and useful. . . (Score:2)
Biting off more than you can chew is an extremely common programmer failing, one many never outgrow, but even for those who do it's usually a matter of decades. Most senior projects should be rejected, and substituted with something smaller, at least in my experience.
For those of you in a s
File sharing client. (Score:1)
That or a SIP client. Voice chat is a big topic these days and you could peek at the source of projects like phonegaim to get insight for your own code.
Good luck. Those are 2 programs that I think would be useful, fun, not too hard and good for your resume!
Some advice... (Score:5, Interesting)
My project was a computer engineering project. We controlled a bunch of simple devices over the web through a server that we had set up.
One thing I learned was to have backup plans and modularity. We listed somewhere between 6-8 devices that we thought might work. We ended up getting 3 of them to work.
What was nice about that was that we could still deliver those 3 devices (which showed up the project that presented right after us which picked a single device and got it to work in a similar fashion).
But we also could scale the amount of work. If things had gone better, and we'd had a little more time, we could have added another device or two. As it is, it took us the semester to get what we did working.
I'd reccomend trying to pick a similar project where you can get a basic set of features working relatively easily, but also have a bunch of other interesting features that you can bring out if you have the time for them. That way you're guaranteed a project that does something right, and the ability to challenge yourself if you need to.
Also, always make sure to have more than one method for doing each part of the project. Inevitably you figure out that something isn't going to work out the way that you thought it would. We had to start from scratch on portions of the project a couple of times. It was immensely helpful to have a solid backup plan to start working on right away.
Hope that helps.
Take the series A fundraising approach... (Score:2)
A java based voice recording system (Score:2)
Here are some ideas (Score:2, Funny)
Start with what interests you (Score:2)
I found the best way to chose a project was to think of something that I found interesting, and knew enough about to be able to reasonably finish the project in a term, but that would still offer me an opportu
Think Outside the Box (Score:2)
Think outside the box. Instead of thinking of a computer project that can occupy a couple of semesters think of a project that could use computing to improve its function.
By way of example, I wanted a PIC programming to control a ham radio transceiver using a program where I only had a rough flowchart. Rather than buy a programmer then struggle with the software I contacted a local univers
Re: (Score:2)
My Capstone (Score:2)
I decided on AI for Games. The game I ended up doing was Mastermind. For the CS side, I did it in Java (which the school had 0 courses in at the time). For the Psychology side, I designed and implemented my own psychological test to be used for the personalities. For the Writing side, I did a Bethsheda-like Q&A to choose a personality.
The f
My suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a little project that I've been meaning to do for quite a while that I think would be a nice senior project. A full implementation would be way too much work, but a simplified version could be both accessible and useful. I think this is the sort of project that, if done well, could generate enough real-world usage and interest to make a name for the author.
A while ago I noticed that most geeky homes and small businesses have something in common: Lots of computers, few of which are backed up effectively, and most of which have disk drives that are significantly larger than needed. So it occurred to me that a backup solution could make use of this spare storage to create additional copies of important, or even all files, on different disks and in different machines. Files that already exist on multiple machines need not be duplicated further, so there would be no need to bother excluding most system files from the backup system.
If that sounds at all interesting, you can read this description [willden.org] I wrote a while ago while thinking through the issues and just threw on my web site (very plain OOo-generated HTML, sorry).
I'll get around to building this thing eventually, but I'd love to see someone use it as a project to get it started.
Find someone in EE or CE.. (Score:1)
I'd try to find someone in another department, who is actually intellegent enough to design something fun, but that would require a great deal of software as well..
A good example would be some sort of robot that could be entered into some sort of competition, IEEE or otherwise, that would give you more credibilit
Blood Clot Tracking Software for MR imaging (Score:1)
Why does it have to be useful? (Score:1)
Now this was not useful other than it taught me a lot about functional languages and some related topics such as garbage collection techniques. I found it fascinating - which was far better than "useful".
Projects at this stage of your career can be fun beca
I have it coming up in a year too (Score:2)
My idea for my senior project is to make a virtual solarsystem. I would have to write the graphics engine, from the ground up, or borrow some from other engines. But I want to make a front end that you choose how many planets, what mass, what color, what size, what topography, maybe what main elements (toss some science in there too. Then you run the simulation, you can watch
alternative ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a couple... (Score:2)
A couple of interesting projects
My senior project (Score:2)