Most students, when planning their curriculum, do not understand what it means to do a senior or master's project. Unfortunately, many leave the university without improving their understanding. Of those that leave before completing the project, most never graduate. The following guidelines, if take seriously, could substantially improve your chances of avoiding this fate.
Plan to spend at least 3 quarters doing your project. It is virtually impossible to complete a meaningful project in only two quarters. Among comparable programs that involve senior or master's projects, Cal Poly is rare in making it possible to consider completing the effort in 2 quarters. Other institutions require a minimum of two full semesters of work for such projects.
It is best if you earn credit for the additional quarter of work by taking CSc400 or CSc500, as appropriate. It is not particularly important which of the 3 quarters is devoted to CSc400/500, but it is probably a good idea to start with CSc400/500. Graduate students can also meet the 3-quarter option by taking 2 units of CSc599 each of 3 quarters. As a general rule, your advisor must get teaching credit during any quarter in which you meet regularly; this allows him or her enough time to meet with you weekly. Use this as a guideline--if you plan to pursue some independent research and won't need much help, there is no need to sign up for CSc400/500, but if you and your advisor will be meeting you must sign up for one of these classes.
Start talking to potential advisors early the quarter before you expect to start your project. It may take longer to find a good match than you think.
The most important consideration in choosing an advisor is what area interests YOU. Next, find an advisor that is also interested in that area. Choosing your "favorite teacher" could be a big mistake if he/she is not particularly interested in your area of interest.
It is vitally important that you choose an area that interests you because doing the project will tax your creative abilities, consume more of your time and energy than you plan or imagine, and may well demand other sacrifices you do not expect. It is much easier to pay those prices for something about which you are passionate. If you agree to work in an area that does not truly interest you, you are more likely to join the ranks of Cal Poly students who have "finished", but never graduated.
Faculty do what we can to accommodate students' interests. But if your advisor does not share your enthusiasm for the project, you are probably in trouble. It is a worn out cliche, but all too true, that Cal Poly faculty are overworked, especially in Computer Science. We have the usual heavy teaching load, but most of us conduct research as well, often over and above our full load. It is a simple matter of economy that we can devote more time and energy to projects closely related to our teaching and/or research interests.
Undergraduates should meet with their advisor for 30 minutes a week, graduate students for one hour a week. This meeting time will be set up at the beginning of every quarter. Although interacting via email can also help you keep moving along, personal meetings are important, if only to report on the rate of your progress, problems you are encountering, etc. Often your advisor will pick up on something that seems insignificant to you and offer valuable guidance to help you keep on track, avoid wasting time, revise your objectives, etc. It is important to keep in mind that these meetings are nothing like classroom or laboratory meetings. Essentially, these meetings should be conducted by you, the student, not by your advisor. You should be prepared with information to report and questions to ask. "Things are moving along OK" is almost always the wrong report to make. Your advisor will usually have questions also. But primary responsibility for preparing for each meeting, to ensure you benefit from it, is yours.
This meeting time with your advisor, during which his or her attention is devoted solely to your project, is the reason you must always sign up for 400, 461, 462, 500, or 599. We faculty must get some sort of credit for these meeting times or else we would have to teach another class instead of meeting with you. You must sign up for one of these classes in any quarter in which you meet with your advisor regularly.
Most or all of your first quarter of work will be devoted to step one: choosing/refining your topic. This is a very important part of the project. If your project advisor gives you a project that is so well defined you do not need to do some serious research and thinking to complete step one, you should seriously consider choosing a different advisor. The one you have chosen is more interested in getting his/her work done than in the quality of your experience.
The first step should produce a fairly detailed annotated outline of the report you will eventually write. This should be much more detailed, for instance, than the outline due at the end of week 3 for a senior project. It will be a clear guide for you to following doing your research and/or development. The final report you write may end up with an outline looking very different from this annotated outline. This is the nature of research. Where one ends up is often very different from one's original expectations. But, without a meaty, well-stated goal, it is quite possible you will never progress to the point of writing your final report.
The second step is to do the research and/or development work you have proposed to do. In almost every case, this will take at least 1 full quarter of fairly intense effort. If there is any quarter during which you will carry a lighter load than usual, this is the best time to do it. If your project does not require this level of effort, then it really is not a legitimate project, and you will be denied an important learning experience.
The final step is to write your report and get it approved by your advisor. Even if your project primarily entails writing software, the critical product is the report you write about the software you have written. It should embody an implementation guide for any who may need to maintain or modify your code, a user's guide for any who may wish to use it, a critique of important lessons learned, and suggestions for further research.
If your project is primarily a research effort, the report is the only product. As such, it will generally be longer, and will be more critically evaluated. It is imperative that you report meaningful information in a clear, understandable way.
Faculty members, or other seniors or graduate students, who have had little or no involvement with your project should be able to read and understand its significance. In some important senses, writing your report is the most important learning experience of the whole exercise. It CANNOT be done in a week or two, as most students tend to believe. You may be able to write your first draft in a week or two. But then your advisor must critique it in detail. That can usually be done in a day or two. But Cal Poly faculty are often very busy, and you may not be able to be placed at the top of the queue when you hand in draft 1. You should allow a week to receive your advisor's critique and directions.
Do not feel bad when that first draft comes back covered with red ink. This is usually your advisor's first best opportunity to give you detailed guidance on what is important to be included or left out, what is the best format, and how clearly your writing style conveys your message. It may well take you longer to compose draft 2, incorporating your advisor's comments, than it did to do draft 1. Do not be discouraged by this, and plan enough time to deal with it. This is the part of the process where you learn most about what should be said and how to say it, when writing technical documents.
Your advisor will need to do a thorough review of draft 2, also, because it will almost certainly be a very different document from the first draft you turned in. This second review usually goes much better. But, again, you should allow a week.
Hopefully your third draft will be the final one, and will primarily involve typographical or other relatively simple changes to draft 2. However, depending on the nature of the changes between drafts 1 and 2, there could be substantive revisions even to draft 3. Do NOT assume draft 3 will automatically be accepted. Allow time for it to be reviewed and for one more editing session.
If you are doing a master's project, at some point you will be given the go-ahead to schedule your defense (oral examination). You must permit your committee to have time to review the report before your defense. You MUST allow at least two weeks for this.
As you see, this step can easily take 5 weeks: half a quarter! Seniors can theoretically complete this step faster than master's candidates, because they do not have the defense and strict format requirements. However, seniors are generally less experienced at writing than are graduates. They usually take longer to do each draft. So the same rule of thumb applies: if a senior project student is not ready to begin writing at midterm of the last quarter, he or she probably will not be done by the end of the quarter. This is why a meaningful project cannot be done in 2 quarters. If you spend a quarter choosing/refining your topic, and half a quarter writing your report, that leaves only half a quarter to do the work - much too little time for a legitimate project.
There will rarely be substantial revision yet to be done after your Oral Exam. But there are often minor changes requested by the committee. So you must allow time after the defense to produce the real final draft. It is also necessary to meet certain format guidelines. Now is NOT the time to start worrying about the format of your document. You should make every effort to meet the format guidelines with your very first draft. You should also take a copy of an early draft to the graduate office to be sure you are on the right track. This will substantially increase the probability your final draft will be accepted. You will not be permitted to graduate if the graduate school does not accept your report.
Give yourself time to pour yourself into the effort. Be sure your living and study environments are conducive to immersing yourself in your work, without frequent interruption. (Room 14-235 is probably the worse place to spend large amounts of time!) Plan to devote at least a total of 5 hrs a week to nothing but the project. For most people, those 5 hrs should consist of at least 2 different sessions. Study sessions should consist of relatively large chunks of time - at least 1+ hrs each. Most people cannot be productive on one subject for more than 3 hrs at a time. Study sessions that are too short imply a relatively high overhead - startup time during which you do not make progress, but simply reconnect with where you left off, "get in the mood", etc.
But the preceding remarks are only guidelines. When you plan a study session try not to schedule a commitment immediately following it. If you are involved with your project, it feels good, and you seem to be making progress, it is good to be able to keep going until the burnout starts to set in. Schedule your study sessions early in the week and leave room for a third (or even a fourth) "make up" session. Sometimes you may find you are reaching burnout after only a short time, or you cannot even "get started" during a particular study session. Your concentration and heart just are not in it. Try to find ways to overcome these periods of non-productivity and get back on track. Beyond a certain point, however, don't push it. This is especially important if you are coding. If you really aren't "into it", you may well create a mess that will cost hours to fix. If the juices just aren't flowing, get away and do something else, and try again at the next best opportunity. Also, if you manage to get 3 or 4 good productive sessions in in one week, there is nothing wrong with that. Being ahead of schedule really is not a sin. And you just might finish the project in 3 quarters, rather than letting it drag on to 4 or 5.
Enjoy doing the project! It could be the single most important part of your college career, and will probably be the part that best prepares you for your career after Poly.
Many students get to the writeup phase of their senior project or thesis and have a difficult time starting to write. Some students finish their research completely but fail to graduate solely because they do not write their results! To help prevent this ``writer's block'' you will be required to turn in some small part of your writeup at the end of each quarter you are registered for CSc 400/461/462/500/599. When the time comes to write your results up these pages will serve as a starting point and make the job or writing your senior project or thesis much easier and less time-consuming.
During the first quarter you sign up for one of these courses you must turn in a one-page proposal that outlines the work you plan to do (two pages for Master's students). This proposal serves to ensure that both you and your advisor have a concrete idea of the problem you intend to solve and the way you intend to solve it. This document will focus your ideas: frequently you'll find that you don't really understand something until you attempt to write it down. It also protects you toward the end of your project when your advisor attempts to get you to do some more work - you can point to the proposal and if the work isn't there you shouldn't have to do it (in most cases).
During your second quarter you should turn in the Problem Description section of your writeup (adapted from your proposal) and a detailed outline of your writeup. You won't have results at this stage, but you should be sufficiently far along that you have some partial results to show and you'll have a good idea of how things are going to turn out. Before your last quarter, then, you'll already have the writeup at least one-quarter written.
During your last quarter of senior project, I MUST have a complete first draft of your writeup by the eighth week. If I do not have it by Monday of the eighth week you will receive an `I' for that course and will not graduate. Master's students must turn in a second draft to their committee members before scheduling their defense.
I recommend the following outline as a general starting point for your writeup:
1) Problem Description and Motivation. Describe the problem in great detail; make it clear to the readers what you're trying to solve. You must also give the readers the sense that the problem is worth solving, otherwise they will stop reading.
2) Previous Work. What other solutions have been proposed or implemented for this problem? Why are they not good enough? You must prepare the readers to believe that your solution (which you have not yet said anything about) is better than these other attempts. This is also the section where you describe any work that your solution is built on top of.
3) Overview of Solution. Describe in broad terms how you intend to solve the problem. Algorithms and high-level data structures should be explained.
4) Interesting Details. (Pick a different title than this.) To write this section imagine that someone else is about to start on this very same project. Now that you're almost done, what advice would you give him or her? What tricky areas did you run up against? Did you have to modify the data structures because of some non-obvious problem? Why did you make some of the decisions that you did? What is the next person going to run into that you already ran into and worked around? It's a good idea to keep notes as you go along so this section will be easier to write when the time comes.
5) Results. Describe your results. Did the project accomplish its goals? Why or why not? Do you have times or pictures that show how well the project works?
6) Future Work. What is the next stage? What didn't you get done that you should have? Now that you're done, what should the next person do to carry on the project? Frequently senior projects are a portion of a larger project, and you have to make sure that your work is understandable by the next person to work on the project.
7) Appendices. If your project involves writing some code that other people will use, you must write a user's manual. Your code will also be included as an appendix.
You should probably get a hard-back composition book that will be dedicated to your senior project or thesis in which you can keep your writeup notes, as well as ideas and notes from your weekly meetings with your advisor.
Grading Senior Projects and Theses is difficult. Rather than adopt a pass-fail attitude I have chosen to differentiate between poor, average, good, and excellent senior projects by attempting to give them the appropriate grades. In order for you to know what you're getting into, gradewise, I give these guidelines. Some of them are purely mechanical, but I think they are all necessary for a successful senior project.
Your 461 or first 599 grade will be influenced by these factors:
1) You must thoroughly read this document. It's amazing how many students get to the end of their Senior Project or Thesis and claim they haven't seen it.
2) You must make reasonable progress in your work. I will keep a record of each of our weekly meetings and mark down a 0, 1 or 2 for each one: 0 for no work, 1 for some work, and 2 for good work. I'll give you three free 0s, but your other 6 or 7 must average out to a 1. If you work hard one week, you can blow off the next week to catch up with a class or something. I apologize for this mechanistic method, but all too many students sign up for 461 or 599 and do hardly anything during the entire quarter; I need some way to document this.
3) As mentioned earlier, by the end of the quarter you must turn in a one-page description of your project. This paper does not need to be particularly polished (unlike the final writeup).
Your 462 or second 599 grade will be influenced by these factors:
1) Your progress will be evaluated similarly to your first quarter: three free 0s and the remainder of the quarter must average to 1.
2) By the third week of the quarter, you MUST turn in the final writeup for two of the sections of your Senior Project or Thesis: the Problem Description and Motivation and Previous Work. If you don't know this stuff by this point you won't be able to finish the course anyway. Also, it's that much less pressure near the end of the quarter.
3) Remember, if you don't get the first draft of the whole entire writeup to me by the beginning of the eighth week you will receive an "I" for the course.
Don't think that the writeup is the most important part of the Senior Project or Thesis. The research or project is the most important part, but the writeup is usually what students seem to fear the most.
Your final grade in 462 or your last 599 will be influenced by the factors mentioned above, plus the overall quality of the project and writeup. An outstanding project and OK or better writeup earns an "A". An OK project and OK writeup earns a "B". A poor project OR a poor writeup earns a "C". I want you to leave Cal Poly with your degree, so if graduation is coming up and your project or your writeup isn't quite in the state you hoped it would be, don't hesitate to turn it in anyway and get your grade and get out.
Regular weekly meetings have already been mentioned. These times need to be set up as early in the quarter as possible so you and your advisor don't miss meetings. The purpose of these regular weekly meetings is mainly to make you feel guilty if you haven't done anything on the project for the previous week (and conversely to make your advisor feel guilty if he or she hasn't done something he said he'd do). Without these meetings it's all too easy to punt a good part of quarter without realizing it - three or four meetings in a row without progress are a sure sign of trouble.
Finally, it is YOUR responsibility to make sure you get your project done. I do not push students to progress or finish; this is a deliberate attitude, not laziness or uncaring on my part. If you allow a week, or a quarter, or a year to go by without any progress I won't make any judgements about why you haven't done anything (there are lots of good reasons for lack of progress), but eventually you are hurt by severe delays in your project. I feel it is important for students to succeed on their own, without a great deal of pushing and prodding. I will not take responsibility for your delays, just as I will not take the credit for an amazingly good project. When you succeed, be proud - you completed your project, and I merely advised. If things begin to look grim, as if you won't finish, re-evaluate your attitude and make sure you aren't depending on me to push you along - this is your project, and your responsibility. You'll find the weekly meetings help keep you on track.
One last thing - it is always a bad idea to leave Cal Poly with your project unfinished. Almost everyone who does this never finishes. Even if all you lack are just a few minor changes, things get much harder if you aren't on campus every day to push them through. It is very hard to work full-time and expect to have some time and motivation left over to finish up your senior project or thesis. Make sure you have a very good reason to leave, because there's about a 90% chance you won't get your degree that you worked so hard on.
This document was adapted from S. Ron Oliver and modified by Chris Buckalew and Emilia Villarreal
