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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?"
Seriously, forget all this "I want to do something really cool and useful!" stuff. That's a good way to wind up with an overly complex that takes too much time and risks not getting done.
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.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
My project was to create a system for algorithmic music composition. My dream was to be able to tweak parameters to generate contextually apropriate soundtracks for video games, or other non-scripted events.
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.