Some of you may also choose to do a senior project or thesis in addition CS190. See A Guide to the Senior Exercise for more details about both of these options.

For CS190, there are two key changes to your coursework if you decide to do a senior project:

1. Your survey paper for the class will be on the topic related to your project. In addition to submitting the survey paper material to the CS190 course instructor, you should also submit the material to your thesis advisor.
2. In addition to the survey paper, you must also prepare a "project plan" (sometimes referred to as an extended abstract). The project plan should be approximately a page and should detail the work that you plan to do for your project including a timeline with rough intermediary goals for the spring. A draft is due with the survey paper draft and a finalized version is due with the final version of the survey paper.

The majority of the senior project work then happens in the spring semester. You will work with your advisor to establish intermediary deadlines and there are a number of general deadlines (see the dates below):

• Progress presentations: Twice during the spring semester you will be asked to give short (about 5 minutes) progress presentations. These presentations should briefly summarize the project and then give results so far.
• Final presentation: Your final presentation will be approximately 10 minutes (actual time limits will be sent prior to the presentations) and should summarize the project and your findings.
• Paper: The final paper will represent the writeup of your project. A Guide To the Senior Exercise will give you formatting guidelines. Work with your advisor to establish other criterion.

Deadlines and Important Dates

The following dates are for the 2021–2022 academic year. They are in addition to the normal CS190 deadlines.

Fall Semester

Date	Time	What
Thursday, September 16	5:00 pm	Ranked list of 1–3 topic/advisor pairs
Thursday, November 11	5:00 pm	Project plan draft
Friday, December 3	5:00 pm	Project plan




Spring Semester (spring dates are subject to change)

Date	Time	What
Friday, February 17	4:00 pm–5:00 pm	Progress presentation 1
Friday, March 17	4:00 pm–5:00 pm	Progress presentation 2
Friday, March 31	5:00 pm	Senior paper draft
Friday, April 22	4:15 pm	Final presentations
Friday, April 29	11:59 pm	Senior paper

Note that at the end of the fall semester, students must obtain approval from their senior project advisor to continue the project in the spring. This decision will be based on successfully completing the preparatory work required work during the fall semester. Those that are approved should signup for CS192 in the spring semester.

These are the only formal deadlines; you should also work with your project advisor to establish intermediate deadlines.

Senior Project Grading

A Guide to the Senior Exercise has more details on how senior projects are graded (see the bottom of page 3, Section 1.2). We do not intend to assign a percentage grade to each of the criteria. However, we want to let you know that these are the criteria we will be evaluating when determining your project grade.

• The goal: Was it appropriately ambitious?
• The preparation: Did the literature review cover the appropriate prior work in the area?
• The execution: Were sufficient efforts (quality and quantity both count) made to accomplish the goal?
• The evaluation of results: Were appropriate steps taken to evaluate the results?
• The presentations: Were the oral and written presentations clear, understandable, and complete?
• Participation: Did the contributions and attendance during group meetings, meetings with the advisor, and the final presentations meet faculty expectations.

Formulation of the project's goals is important. On the one hand, a successful project need not be one that is clearly better than all previous work in the area. We often learn as much or more from experiments that fail as those that succeed. On the other hand, we expect you to make your project as successful as possible within the time constraints.

There is an interaction between the goal and execution. A wonderful execution of a trivial goal may not be worth much more than a weak execution on a more challenging goal. A ridiculously challenging goal may preclude you from any success at all. We are looking for balance.

Resources

• Examples of past senior projects (and titles for a larger number of projects):
• Phuong Nguyen, 2022
• Ilana Shapiro, 2022
• Evan von Oehsen, 2022
• Austin Blatt, 2018
• Max Schwarzer, 2018
• Joshua Landgraf, 2016
• Michael Cohen and Matt Sloane, 2015
• Shannon Lubetich, 2015
• Kim Merrill, 2014
• Paul McCormack, 2012
• Dan Feblowitz, 2011
• April Wensel, 2008
• Charlez Zhou, 2008
• Nathan Reed, 2008 (a full-year research thesis)