Calendar and Requirements

Dates and Deadlines

Fall 2025 One-Term Projects Schedule

Sept 2: Deadline to Select an IW Seminar or Adviser
Sept 2: Attend the "Getting Started" information meeting at 4:30pm In Friend 101
Sept 19: Submit a written project proposal by 11:59pm Eastern in the IW portal
Sept 26: SEAS funding application due by 5pm
Oct 21: Submit the checkpoint form by 11:59pm Eastern in the IW portal
Nov 4: Attend the "How to Give an IW Talk" time and room TBD (required for all first-time IW students)
Nov 7: Last day for seniors to extend their project to a thesis
Nov. 7: BSE students - Final Day to drop COS 498B from your schedule.
Nov 11: Attend the "How to Write an IW Paper" time and room TBD (required for all first-time IW students)
Dec 8: Submit oral presentation slides and video-recorded oral presentation by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal
Jan 8: Submit a written final report by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal. (Note: All papers submitted after this deadline will incur a 1/3 grade penalty.)

Spring 2026 One-Term Projects Schedule

Dec 12: IW Portal Opens for Submission of Spring 2024 IW Sign-Up Form
Dec 12: Deadline to Select an IW Seminar or Adviser and submit the IW Sign-Up Form in the IW portal
Jan 27: Attend the "Getting Started" Information Meeting, room and time TBD
Feb TBD: SEAS Funding Application due
Feb 12: Submit a Written Project Proposal by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal
March 5: Submit the Checkpoint Form by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal
March 17: Attend "How to Give an IW Talk", 12:30pm in CS 104 (required for any students who have not previously completed an IW project)
March 24: Attend "How to Write an IW Paper", 12:30pm in CS 104 (required for any students who have not previously completed an IW project)
April 12: Submit Oral Presentation Slides and Video-Recorded Oral Presentation by 11:59 pm Eastern, in the IW portal (required for all seminar students, and all first-time BSE IW students doing a one-on-one project)
April 26: Submit a Written Final Report by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal. (Note: All papers submitted after this deadline will incur a 1/3 grade penalty.)

2025-26 Thesis Project Schedule

Sept 2: Deadline to Select an Adviser
Sept 2: Attend the "Getting Started" Information Meeting at 4:30pm in Friend 101
Sept 19: Submit a Written Project Proposal by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal
Sept 26: SEAS Funding Application due by 5pm
Oct 21: Submit the Checkpoint Form by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal
Nov 4: Attend the "How to Give an IW Talk" time and room TBD (optional)
Nov 7: Last day for BSE students to drop the senior thesis
Nov 11: Attend the "How to Write an IW Paper" time and room TBD (optional)
Nov 11: Select a second reader by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal
Dec 8: Submit Midpoint Thesis Report by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal
Feb TBD: SEAS Funding Application due
Feb 19: Submit a Draft Paper by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal
March 17: Attend "How to Give an IW Talk", 12:30pm in CS 104 (optional)
March 24: Attend "How to Write an IW Paper", 12:30pm in CS 104 (optional)
April 16: Submit a Written Final Report by 11:59pm Eastern, in the IW portal. (Note: All papers submitted after this deadline will incur a 1/3 grade penalty.)
April 19: Submit Slides for Oral Presentation by 11:59pm Eastern, in IW portal
April 20-24: Oral presentation week. (Schedule a live, or zoom presentation with your adviser. Must be completed by April 28.)

Important steps

Information Sessions

During the first few days of the term, we host a "Getting Started" meeting to explain the key requirements, review the schedule for the term, and provide information about the seminars. Attendance is mandatory for all students starting IW that term.

During the second half of the term, there will also be meetings on how to give an IW talk and how to write an IW paper. These are mandatory for all students doing independent work for the first time.

"Getting Started" meeting slides (Fall 2025)

"How to give an IW Talk" meeting slides (Spring 2025)

"How to Write an IW Paper" meeting slides (Fall 2024)

Written Project Proposal

Three or four weeks into the term, you must submit a 1-2 page written proposal describing your intended project plan. The written proposal should have the following sections:

Title

Include your name, class, project title, and adviser.

Motivation and Goal

Give a high-level introduction to your topic area and state specifically what problem you will be addressing. You should clearly state the goal of your project with a sentence beginning “The goal of my project is …”. Explain why that goal is important and/or interesting, perhaps with a description of applications or people enabled by achieving it.

Problem Background and Related Work

Place your project in the context of prior work. Give some background of what has been done before to achieve your stated goal. Include citations to closely related academic papers and/or list commercial products targeted at the same goal. Finish this section with a brief explanation of the problem unsolved by previous work that will be addressed by your project.

Approach

Provide a concise description of the key idea underlying your approach to achieving the stated goal. Provide an argument of why your approach is a good idea – i.e., why it can achieve the stated goal where others have not.

Plan

Describe the steps you plan to take and/or the issues you plan to address during the execution of your project. What data sets will you have to acquire? What algorithms will you have to develop? What theorems will you have to prove? etc. For the steps that are non-trivial, provide a brief description of the issue, options, and planned approach. Please indicate any particularly risky aspects of the project and discuss contingencies in case they do not go as planned.

Evaluation

Describe the methodology you plan to use to evaluate how well your project has achieved the stated goal. Be specific. What data will you use? What test will you run? What quantitative metric will you use to measure success? etc. This is a very important and often overlooked aspect of a project plan — please think about it before finalizing your project selection.

How to Submit

Create a PDF file named "written_project_proposal.pdf"
Submit the PDF file via the independent work portal, use the submit link for "Written Proposal"
Email the PDF file to your adviser

Checkpoint Form

The checkpoint form serves as a tool to provide feedback to you and to the department about whether you are making consistent progress, whether you should meet with your adviser more often, and/or whether there are any potential roadblocks to completing your proposed project. All students complete a Checkpoint Form.

These prompts are not intended to be difficult or time-consuming. Responses are meant to be brief and include a description of what you have accomplished so far and what remains to be done. There are three parts:

Progress to date: Mention any ideas you have had, software you have built, related research you have evaluated and papers or textbooks you have read.
Current difficulties: If you are having difficulty making progress on your project due to some obstacle, explain the obstacle and a plan for overcoming the problem.
Next steps: Detail how you anticipate proceeding for the rest of the term.

As a guideline, you should meet approximately weekly with your adviser and provide updates on your progress. This will happen naturally if you are in an independent work seminar. If you are not, we strongly recommend setting up a schedule to meet your adviser every week at the same time. As a rule of thumb, try to allocate 10-15 hours of time per week for progress on your independent work project.

How to Submit: complete the relevant form through the independent work portal well in advance of the deadline. Your adviser will review and add any feedback.

Second Reader for Thesis Projects

Every thesis must have both an adviser and a second reader. The second reader reviews your thesis and provides input to your grade. You may want to choose and involve a second reader early in your project. If your adviser is not faculty in the Computer Science Department then your second reader must be a faculty member in the Computer Science Department. Your second reader may be a postdoc, but they may not be your adviser's postdoc.

To complete the second reader form, please log into the independent work portal.

Midpoint Thesis Report

At the end of the fall term, thesis students will submit the Midpoint Thesis Report. The Midpoint Thesis Report should be around 5-10 pages long. The report should include a full outline of your paper. It should also include an introduction section with motivation and goals fully explained. Include a brief background of the problem and any related work that you have discovered so far. The report must also include a short description of your progress to date, current challenges, and planned next steps.

Students should discuss the exact requirements for the paper with their adviser. While the department has a minimum requirement of 5-10 pages, an adviser may wish to see more. In general, the draft paper should contain (one or more of) the following components:

Introduction. A tentative overview of the project including your motivation and goals. Why should the reader care? What is the problem and why hasn’t it been solved already? What do you hope to do that is new?
Background information and problem description. What is the general area of research and the specific problem that you are solving?

Note: The Midpoint Thesis Report serves as the basis for the P/D/F grade that students are awarded for COS 498A and COS 498B, Senior Thesis I.

Draft paper for Thesis Projects

Students doing 2-semester IW or a Thesis must submit a written draft paper. This is not expected to be a full thesis, but it should include a complete outline and give you some practice with technical writing. It should be at least 4-5 pages long (single-spaced).You should discuss the exact requirements for the paper with your adviser. You can reuse this material in your final thesis.

A draft should general include the following:

1. Background information and problem description. What is the general area of research and the specific problem that will be tackled?

2. Related research. Have there been previous academic papers on this or related topics? Are there companies that have developed related software products? What is the historical context? Be sure to cite related research properly.

3. Progress so far. Explain your major accomplishments so far. Be as precise as possible.

4. Plan for the remainder of the year. Outline the steps you will take to complete your thesis. Explain how you will evaluate your results. Include at least 3 weeks for writing.

How to Submit:

Create a PDF file named "draft_paper.pdf"
Submit the PDF file via the IW PORTAL, use the submit link for "Draft Paper"
Email the PDF file to your adviser

Funding

AB students can apply for independent work project/senior thesis research funding by accessing the online application in the Student Activities Funding Engine (SAFE).

SEAS also offers funding, which is available to any COS student, both AB and BSE, for senior thesis or IW projects. The Fall 2025 application is due September 26, 2025 by 5pm. The application is available here: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/303eacaeeb944d329025f3e9cefa1956

Final Presentations

Every student is required to give a talk about their independent work.

This is an important part of the process, and giving a good talk is harder than you might think. In order to become a great scientist or engineer, students need to be able to effectively communicate their ideas.

Presentation slides and video-recorded IW talks for single-term students are due toward the end of the semester and will be reviewed and graded by your adviser.

Please submit the presentation slides and recorded IW talk describing your project via the independent work portal. Your presentation should have a visual of your slides with audio of your oral presentation recorded over the slides. It's preferred that you are visible in a picture-in-picture during the presentation, but it is not required.

Step 1. Presentation Slides: You can make your presentation slides in any presentation tool (e.g., Keynote or PowerPoint), as long as it can export to PDF. Although there are many ways to organize your presentation and slides, we strongly recommend that yours adhere to the following outline:

Title slide: Include your name, class, project title, and adviser.
Motivation and Goal: Introduce your topic area and state specifically what problem you will be addressing. You should clearly state the goal of your project (i.e., “The goal of my project is …”). Explain why that goal is important and/or interesting. What people and/or applications would benefit? Give some examples of the problem being addressed to help make it easier to understand.
Problem Background and Related Work: You probably are not the first person to work towards this goal, nor will you be the last. Give some background of what has been done before. Have academics already written papers on this topic? Are there already products on the market? Why do they not solve the problem? What aspects of the problem are still uninvestigated? It is always the case that someone has done something that can be related to what you are going to do. Find out the most closely related pieces of work and explain the relationship to your proposed project.
Approach: Clearly explain the key idea behind the approach you are taking and explain why it is a good idea. What is your key insight to solve the problem? What makes your approach unique in comparison to previous work? It might be that you are asking a different question than others have before, or attacking the problem in a different way, or using different tools, or leveraging different data sets. In any case, describe the most interesting “key idea” behind your project and justify why you chose it.
Implementation: Describe the steps you have completed and/or the subproblems you have solved to make progress on your project. For each of them, you may want to describe: What was the main issue? What options were available? What solution did you create/choose and why? How did you perform the implementation? What tools did you use? How well does your solution work? What remains to be done? If your implementation is not complete, outline any logistical or technical problems you anticipate and explain any contingency plan you have for avoiding or coping with them.
Results. Every project should have some means of measuring success. Explain the methods you will use to evaluate how well your implementation achieves the goal articulated at the beginning of the talk. Perhaps you will need to describe your test data sets, your measurement techniques, your evaluation metrics, etc. If possible, provide some quantitative comparisons of your results to alternative methods (e.g., the previous state-of-the-art, random results, etc.). Part of (not the entire presentation) may involve giving a demo of your results.
Conclusion. Sum up the most important aspects of the talk concisely.

Note that some of the points may not be relevant for some types of projects, and others will probably require more than one slide. Please do not feel constrained by the number of slides, and do not feel that you have to address every point raised above. Tell a coherent story about what you are trying to do, how you are doing it, and how well your solution works … while staying within the time limits.

Use images or graphics to support your points wherever possible, minimizing the use of text on slides. In particular, do not put all the text you will say on your slides – so boring. The text on slides should be short sentences or phrases that convey key points after a quick glance, not sentences and paragraphs that provide the entire script for the talk. Many excellent research talks are composed almost exclusively of pictures and graphs.

Your slides should be well-organized, uncluttered, easy to read, and visually appealing. Most presentation programs have some pre-packaged slide backgrounds, etc., that have reasonable color/font schemes for text, bullets, etc. You should probably use them but do not use an overly gaudy background that distracts from the content of your slides. The slides should convey the content as clearly as possible without distractions -- how slides are organized, sized, colored, etc. are important aspects of the presentation, as they have great effect on the ease with which a viewer can follow your ideas.

Presentations in the Fall

For single-termr projects, you will have at most nine (9) minutes long for the pre-recorded talk. A link to your talk and a pdf of your slides will be submitted to the IW portal.

Thesis students do not complete an oral presentation until the spring term.

Be sure to practice in advance, by yourself and if possible to your friends, and to go over your talk with your adviser. Your adviser will be able to give you good feedback on both the content and the style of presentation. You will be assessed on both the proposal content and the clarity and effectiveness of your presentation. You should not assume that the audience has a specialized knowledge of your field. Assume your audience is a group of senior undergraduates from Princeton who have not necessarily taken the courses that are most closely related to your research area.

How to Submit Slides:

Create a zip file named "oral_presentation.zip" containing all the files needed for your talk
Login to the COS IW Portal.
Click the "Submit File" button next to the "Oral Presentation Slides" assignment.
Browse your computer for the ZIP file. Again, it should be named "oral_presentation.zip".
Click the blue "Submit" button at the bottom of the page.
Email the ZIP file with your slides to your adviser

Step II. Video-Recorded Talk

You are welcome to use any approach that you feel comfortable with but keep in mind that the focus of the video is the content of your talk, not video production. The format of your talk also needs to be accessible to the faculty graders without downloading any special software. Most students record a Zoom meeting of themselves presenting while sharing their screen with the slides displayed.

How to Submit Your Video Recording:

Upload your video recording to Google Docs, YouTube, or some other sharing platform.
Login to the COS IW Portal.
Click "Click to complete form" next to the "Oral Presentation Video Link" assignment.
Enter the URL of your video presentation (make sure sharing is set so that anyone with the link can view it).
Click the blue "Submit" button.

Written Final Report

Every IW project will result in a written final report describing the goal(s), related work, approach, implementation, results, and conclusion of the project, using much the same outline as suggested for the Oral Presentation. Unlike the oral presentation, which must be extremely concise due to time constraints, the written report can delve into more details, cite all relevant previous work, present results of many experiments with tables and plots, etc.

The written final report should look like a professional document -- 12pt Times-Roman font, 1-inch margins, double-spaced. Here is a template for some formatting guidelines. It should contain a proper bibliography, and all non-original text should be properly attributed. Failing to cite appropriate sources for ideas, tables, text or diagrams is a serious violation of Princeton's code of ethics. If you are unsure about how to cite ideas or research papers properly and create a bibliography, speak with your adviser — they can tell you exactly how to do it. Your report will be graded on the basis of its technical content, organization, creativity of ideas, and quality of writing.

The final written reports for one-semester projects should be 20-25 pages long. Theses should be 40-50 pages long. Relevant charts, tables, diagrams, etc., should be included, with accompanying captions. Be sure to refer to each such chart in the main body of the text, clearly explaining its nature and purpose. The technique of "padding" papers using multiple, overly-large figures is well-known, and should be avoided. If you have lengthy code or auxiliary examples or detailed algorithms or long proofs or supplementary data of other kinds, it may not be appropriate to include this in its entirety in the main body of your report. However, you are encouraged to include such auxiliary data (if you feel it is appropriate) in a final portion of your report clearly labeled "Appendix." The Appendix may be as long as is necessary — it may extend beyond the page limit.

Talk to your adviser about how to write your final report. It is usually best to start writing the report early in the semester and refine it continuously throughout the semester. Talk to your adviser about exactly what they are looking for in your report. The best reports are prepared with enough time for the adviser to read over a draft and give comments for revision.

For additional help, note that The Writing Center offers student writers free, one-on-one conferences with experienced fellow writers trained to consult on assignments in any discipline. The Princeton Writing Program also offers resources for writers in a broad range of technical fields through Writing In Science and Engineering.

How to Submit:

Create a PDF file named "written_final_report.pdf"
Submit the PDF file via the IW PORTAL, use the submit link for "Written Final Report".
Email the PDF to your adviser

Senior Thesis students must review the Senior Thesis Submission Information for Students to complete the process.

PLEASE NOTE: All papers submitted after the deadline will incur a 1/3 grade penalty.