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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?"
You could try one of the ideas from Summer of Code that didn't make the cut. The summer-discuss group was full of ideas. http://groups.google.com/group/summer-discuss?hl=e n
"Scientists have proof without certainty; Creationists have certainty without proof" -Ashley Montagu
When your boss asks about the relative merits of switching from a microcontroller-based product to one that uses CPLD's
...You'll wake up horribly dissapointed that such
conversations don't happen in the real world.
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.