Call For Projects
Fall 2024

To prepare for the upcoming Fall 2024 semester, the NCSU Computer Science Senior Design Center is now accepting project proposals from potential sponsors.

By participating in our program, sponsors will have the chance to meet and work with graduating Computer Science seniors who are about ready to enter the professional arena — what a great recruitment opportunity! Please consider joining us during the upcoming Fall 2024 semester!

Our Mission & Approach

We teach students to develop software from a multidisciplinary perspective: our mission is to help our students to integrate their technical expertise with their professional communication skills, that is their writing, speaking, project management and teaming skills. Each project team will have a technical advisor assigned to them who will help guide the students as they explore requirements, outline the design of their system, implement per that design, and then create/execute a test plan. A technical communicator also works with the students (along with the technical advisors) on their presentation and documentation skills. Guidance on team matters and project management techniques is also provided by the Center. Mentors from our industrial partners/sponsoring companies orient students to the company's domain and any particular software environment that may be specific to the company.

The fee ($7500K/project for Fall 2024) given from our sponsoring companies helps with Center operating expenses; this fee does not imply any type of contractual agreement between our sponsors and the Center/students. Sponsors are asked to help mentor their Senior Design student team (4-5 students) throughout the semester. Our priority is to educate students and prepare them for their next chapter by using "real-world" scenarios and mentorship.

Project Proposals: What Makes a Good Project?

The best projects are those that provide opportunities for thoughtful software design decisions and interesting implementation challenges. We want students to apply their software engineering skills. It is acceptable for you to indicate a preference for specific technologies, such as a programming language you would like students to use or a framework/library you prefer your system to be built on. However, we aim to provide our students with the experience of evaluating trade-offs and the exploration of suitable technologies to achieve a solution. Our students also generally prefer to have the ability to choose technologies that are already familiar to them.

The projects you propose should be non-critical to the mission of your organization. We prioritize the learning experience over the quality and completion of the deliverables. Good projects are those that are relevant and interesting to you, but that perhaps have been relegated to being back-burner projects or nice-to-haves.

Project descriptions are presented to students on the first day of class. Students will have a short amount of time to choose and bid for 3 of their favorites. A good project description will be clear and succinct so that students can quickly get a sense of what the project is about and what it would entail to solve the problem. It is often helpful to provide preliminary system requirements or concrete use cases/scenarios to help illustrate your vision for the project.

Students will be working in teams and have one semester to complete the project. We would like to see projects that lend themselves well to being split up into subtasks that can be solved collaboratively. A good aim for scope is a project that would normally be solvable by a team of 4-5 junior software engineers. The most successful projects are those that have a feasible core set of features with multiple incremental additions that students can build in after completing the core. When drafting your project description, it is useful to clearly identify the core set of features (i.e., minimum viable product) and to label the additional incremental features as stretch goals that would be nice to have if time permits.

Conversely, projects that are generally not well-suited for our program include:

• Projects with minimal implementation. If a project mostly requires putting a series of existing libraries together it will not provide enough scope or opportunities for meaningful design decisions. Projects that involve mostly cofiguring parameters also fall under this category (e.g., configuring cloud services).
• Projects that are too focused on data analysis. These are projects where the main contribution/deliverable is the result of processing a dataset (e.g., a ML/AI model) and tend to fall in the “minimal implementation” category above. However, systems built around ML models that you provide are likely to be good fits, such as dashboards, visualizations, or systems that include the model as one of its components to provide additional functionality.

We recommend that you review the list of previous projects we have offered to get a better sense of what we expect to see.

Review Process

The review process will begin shortly after the due date (1). Your project will be assessed for scope and appropriateness (see project proposals above). Sponsors will receive comments, questions, and suggestions on potential edits to make the project better aligned with our program (2). We'll esablish a feedback loop of comments/revisions (3, 4) until the project description is finalized (5).

While outright rejection of project proposals is rare, we reserve the right to reject any project proposal for any reason, but the reason will be communicated to you. Common reasons for rejection include problems with scope (too small or too large without ability for smaller partial deliverables), poor fit for our program (e.g., projects that are mostly data analysis or that lack design opportunities), legal limitations, and unethical practices.

We prioritize proposals submitted by ePartners provided these are submitted by the deadline (see above). Project descriptions must be approved by the Center's staff before being considered for our program.

Submission Instructions

Step 1

Download and complete the Project Proposal Template. If you are proposing multiple projects, complete and submit the template separately for each project.

Step 2

Submit the completed template via this Form. If you are proposing multiple projects, submit the form one time for each project.

Frequently Asked Questions

We have a list Project Sponsorship FAQs that we continuously update.

Contact Us

If you have further questions, please contact Ms. Margaret Heil - Director, NCSU CSC Senior Design Center at heil@ncsu.edu.