Date: 10 Dec 2002 17:40:53 -0500
From: Randolph Wang <rywang@CS.Princeton.EDU>
To: jlange@princeton.edu, kazad@princeton.edu, ashustef@princeton.edu,
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CC: randy_class2@cs
Subject: end-of-semester reports
Reply-to: rywang@cs.princeton.edu

Dear CS independent project participants,

Now that some of you are done with your project presentations, the
next todo item is the end-of-semester report.  Just a couple of notes
about the requirement of the reports.

(1) Your advisors have the final say in terms of what they are looking
    for in the report.  You may wish to discuss that with your
    advisors.  I personally don't have specific requirements such as
    page count constraints.  There are some general advices about a
    typical template of a computer science research paper on the
    course web site.

(2) People who are working on a 2-semester thesis are also required to
    turn in an end-of-semester report.  Again, I'm leaving the
    specific requirements to the advisors.  There were a few cases of
    mumbling about this from some students last year who thought this
    was wasting their time.  Here're my responses:

    (a) Some possible content of this report may go directly into the
        final thesis.  These may include background, related work, the
        problem statement, etc.  So it's hardly a waste.  The least we
        should have understood by now is the problem statement and the
        background info.

    (b) This is a good time to summarize what you have done/learned in
        the past semester.

    (c) If extensive writing about the work itself is deemed premature
        at this stage, the advisor and the student can come to a
        mutual agreement in terms of how much writing is expected.  It
        can be brief, for example, but a writeup is still required.

    I will solicit grades and feedback from the advisors about this
    intermediate report just as I did for the checkpoint.

(3) I have enjoyed the talks and to those of you who have finished,
    thank you!  And to those who are yet to give theirs, keep the good
    stuff going! :)

Cheers,
Randy