Dr. Radana Dvorak, Director & Associate Professor

Welcome to the Winter Quarter Week 4, and Happy Chinese New Year – year of the Tiger! I learned that the year of the tiger symbolizes courage, bravery, enthusiasm, ambition, confidence, and leadership, which segways nicely into my Week 4 message challenging all students to seek courage and, with confidence, start preparing for your capstone project.

In the Winter Term 2021 STC Thursday Byte, Dean Chung wrote about the importance of your capstone project and the need to start thinking about it as soon as you start taking your first courses at STC. I followed up on his theme writing about being strategic in planning your career, the importance of finding your passion, and using the capstone project to showcase your knowledge and interests in interviews. In my current CS 100 BS Program Orientation course, one student asked a great question when capstone project information was addressed: “What type of capstones other cyber security student have made? I like the idea of creating something a prospective employer could look at.. but I would like to see some examples.”

Here is my advice: participate in our various STC activities such as networking events where you can ask about capstone projects, week 10 research symposiums where capstone projects are presented, connecting with students and faculty in clubs such as the data science or cybersecurity club, research groups, invited talks, and seek out mentors to support you on your journey. You can also contact your program manager and ask him or her to discuss examples of past projects.

Here are several resources I have provided to students to help with ideas for possible capstone projects:

GitHub Final Year Projects

Cybersecurity Projects

“Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects” from Communications of the ACM July 2021

GitHub Computer Science Projects

Zooniverse – people-powered crowdsourcing research in almost every discipline you can think of – art, language, climate, biology, social science, etc.; there are hundreds of research initiatives currently underway. Perhaps you can use your knowledge and start thinking of developing a tool to help one of the international research projects.

So, in the week of the New Lunar Year, I challenge you to be a Tiger!

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Francis of Assisi – “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”