The James Scholar program gives you an opportunity to do something fun and exciting as an undergraduate. While anyone can in theory pursue interesting ideas outside the scope of their day jobs, very few people actually do. If you go into graduate school or academia, you can work along similar lines, but you will also have to deal with other concerns, such as funding, publication, getting a degree done, etc. Thus, you're unlikely to ever have another opportunity as flexible and open as you do as an undergraduate. The James Scholar program can serve as a forcing function for you, giving you deadlines to encourage you to take advantage of your opportunity.
For EE students, I suggest using the senior design project as a target. Think of something exciting and challenging that you would like to do in your last year. Maybe you'd like to develop robots and control software to map an new environment by combining camera data with GPS-based localization. Maybe you want to design and build a more accurate lie detector. Maybe you want to develop an audio environment to support voice scrambling with natural-sounding results. Once you've thought of a goal that interests you, ask yourself what information you need to be able to accomplish your goal. Which classes should you take? What material will you have to learn outside? Will any of the faculty be interested in your work as a research project, or just out of general interest? Your James Scholar advisor can help to answer some of these questions, and can also help you to sharpen hazy goals, but you should come up with some ideas yourself, as you'll need to do something that you like in order to do something outstanding.
For CompE students, 411 takes the place of the senior design project, so you don't have as much flexibility. You can, of course, go beyond the scope of the processor design project, but if you want to work on characterization of 20 nm devices, you're going to have to do it outside of 411. I do still recommend that you try to do a project, but you should consider opportunities with faculty, or at least try to find someone who can advise you on an independent study project (397/497) or thesis (499). You might also consider ADSL (395).
Most of the faculty have undergraduates in their research groups. As one of our best students, I also encourage you to explore opportunities for research in areas that interest you. The best approach is perhaps to take a class or two in the area and to talk with the faculty member teaching the class. Explorations seminars are another avenue, as are independent study projects, but most faculty members like to gather an impression of people before committing significant amounts of time.
Return to Steve's Home Page
written 7-Mar-03, new course #'s 26-Apr-07