What was Your Senior Project?

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?"

Comments

Oooh.

[Seumas]

You should develop an application that will take into account numerous global and business factors to show CEOs - in real time - what their total cost savings is based on their outsourced and offshored efforts over what they would have spent if they had not done so. Then it should give projected savings for "what-if" conditions, such as laying off more employees, moving more work overseas, ignoring more labor laws. You get the picture. It could even be a sweet little Dashboard Widget to make that dashboard crap useful for once!

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.

[bjprice]

Where's the -1, Bitter option when you need it?

Re:Oooh.

[Seumas]

Shut up, college boy. :P

Re:Oooh.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an 8th grade GPA of 0.13 (yes, that's possible).

I just had my 5 year anniversary with my current employer. :)

Carl's Jr.?

Re:Oooh.

[tigersha]

Sorry to break this to you son, but the guy in the white coat who gives you pills every morning is NOT really your employer.

Finally

[daeley]

Hey, everybody, please help this 'person' out. My senior project was to create a brain in a jar who would be unaware of its artificiality long enough for it to 'complete' a virtual senior CS project. If you help it out, we both win!

Dear Slashdot,

[sootman]

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. What was your project, and please include a link to the source code. TIA! :-)

I made a chicken enchiladas...

[goodenoughnickname]

...with rice and beans on the side.

Oops, I'm sorry -- that was my señor project.

Here are some ideas

[some guy I know]

Here are some ideas:

• Write an automated teaching system that will make college professors obsolete.
• Rewrite MS-Windows XP in Perl.
• Write a help assistant for Open Office that takes the form of a pop-up staple named "Stapley".
• Write a library for NASA that can determine whether a measurement is in Standard or Metric and automatically convert between them when necessary.
• Develop a methodology for maintaining software that doesn't involove adding feature after feature over time until, after a few years, the whole thing is a bloated mess (e.g., any Microsoft project, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, etc.).
• Rewrite Slashcode (the software that runs Slashdot) so that it produces valid HTML.