Call for Capstone Project Mentors

The University of Memphis CS Capstone Course (COMP 4882) is seeking technology and/or science professionals to serve as project mentors. Mentorship mainly involves two things:

Proposing a software project for a student team (roughly 4 members) to implement.
Playing the dual roles of mentor and customer as the team builds your project.

Participation has many benefits:

Opportunity to meet (and potentially recruit) CS undergrads about to graduate.
Opportunity to share with students the skills that you believe are particularly important for CS graduates to possess.
Opportunity to visit the capstone course to let the students know what your business is about and what opportunities they might find there.
Satisfaction of helping and mentoring CS undergrads as they make the leap from students to young professionals.

If you're interested in participating, the first step is to propose a software project. The project will last throughout the Spring semester (January 18th to May 4th), and the deadline for proposals is Tuesday, January 17, 2017. Detailed instructions follow.

What Being a Mentor Involves

Above all, the capstone project is meant to be an excellent educational experience for our students.

As part of proposing a project, you must be willing to really work with the student team. They "report" to me (Prof. Fleming) as their "supervisor", but you are their "customer", just as if they were in a real work environment. In the same way that you would mentor, coach, and evaluate a contractor doing a job for you, we expect you to do so with your team. Additionally, you will assist me by providing regular feedback on your team (mainly via a monthly on-line questionnaire).

To ensure effective communication between you and your team, you must meet with them regularly (once per month at minimum). In-person meetings are preferred, but some phone meetings (for example, via conference call or Skype) would be acceptable. You must also be responsive to ad hoc emails and other such week-to-week communications.

How to Propose a Project

To propose a project, please answer the following questions, and send your responses to Scott Fleming (Scott.Fleming@memphis.edu). Use as much or as little text as you'd like, but the more succinct the better.

Project title: What shall we call your software project? Additionally, if your title is somewhat long, please include an alternative short version (e.g., an acronym) that is 25 characters or less.
Customer, affiliation, and contact info: Who are you? What is your affiliation (e.g., employer if relevant to the project)? If students have questions, how can they reach you (email preferred)?
Project summary: What sort of software will your team build? What are the key objectives of the project? What makes the project interesting or beneficial?
Project deliverables: What do you expect to be handed to you by May?
Team size: What size of student team do you think is appropriate for this project? (3–5 students is typical.)

Example Proposals

Here are a couple good examples of past project proposals:

Helpful Tips

Here are a few things to keep in mind while coming up with your proposal:

The students are the main audience for this proposal (not me, the instructor). The proposal-selection process almost always involves having the students rate their level of interest in working on each proposal, so you will want your proposal to be understandable and appealing to them.
The proposed software cannot be trivially simple, which usually means that it must have some interesting behavior. For example, web pages that do nothing but present static information (like this page) would not be acceptable, but web applications that accept user input, store data, and compute output (like Twitter and Facebook) would be acceptable.
The project need not be extraordinarily challenging technically. For example, even straightforward web applications require sufficient technical prowess to be of interest to most capstone students. The same is true of mobile applications (e.g., Android). In fact, projects in well-established development domains are somewhat preferred, because it is clearer what work needs to be done and how to divide that work up among the team members.
Students' time resources to work on the project are less than professional software developers: the semester is only 15 weeks long, and the students likely have other courses that take some of their time each week. Thus, the scope of the software project may need to be somewhat constrained.
It is important to keep in mind that the main goal of this course is an educational experience for the students, and it should not be misconstrued as work for hire (or slave labor).
Once the course ends, the students graduate (typically). Thus, you should not necessarily assume that the students will continue to maintain or work on the project after the course is over.
Given these constraints, a safe expectation would probably be for the student team to produce a high-quality research prototype or proof of concept (as opposed to a production system).

Any Questions?

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me. Likewise, if I have any questions about your proposal, I will let you know.

Thank you for your time and consideration. With your help, we can provide our CS graduates an opportunity to bloom as developers and young professionals, and to enter post-graduate life ready to take on the grand challenges that face our changing world!

Contact Info

Scott Fleming
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Memphis
375 Dunn Hall
Memphis, TN 38152

Office Phone: 901-678-3142
Dept. Phone: 901-678-5465
Fax: 901-678-1506

Email: Scott.Fleming@memphis.edu
Homepage: http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~sdf/