Guidelines and Useful Information

Guidelines and Useful Information

• COS Independent Work Requirements
• Independent Work Seminars
• BSE Thesis Option
• Selecting Good Projects
• Giving Good Talks
• The McGraw Center for Teaching & Learning
• Grading Policy
• Collaboration Policy
• Generative AI Policy
• Funding
• Personnel
• Example Single-Semester Projects from Previous Years
• Example Two-Semester Theses from Previous Years
• Office of Undergraduate Research

COS Independent Work Requirements

AB students are required to participate in a Junior Research Workshop (JRW) in the fall of junior year, a separate semester of independent work (IW) in the spring of junior year, and a two-semester thesis in their senior year. 

• Click here for more information about AB junior IW requirements
• Click here for more information about AB senior thesis requirements

BSE students majoring in Computer Science are required to do at least one semester of independent work.  They indicate their intention to do independent work by enrolling in 397, 398, 497, or 498 and filling out the IW Sign Up form. BSE students may take as many semesters of IW as they wish, but only one additional semester of independent work may be counted as one of the departmental courses.

BSE seniors have the option of doing a two-semester thesis.  This is done by signing up for both 497 and 498 and selecting the thesis option on the IW Sign Up Form.  If you choose this option, you will receive a single grade for the entire year (you'll temporarily receive an "incomplete" on your transcript in January, which will be filled in with the correct grade in May).

• Click here for more information about BSE junior IW options
• Click here for more information about BSE senior IW and thesis options

Starting in Fall 2025 Sophomores may not participate in COS IW for credit. IW for course credit is only available to juniors and seniors. 

Independent Work Seminars

The IW seminars provide a way for students working on similar projects to have more interaction, assistance, and feedback from peer students.  With individual advising, students working on related problems rarely interact with one another. They each meet with their advisers separately, and don’t hear much about what other students are doing.

The IW seminars bring together groups of students working on related problems.  Each student chooses and works on his/her own project, just as any other IW. The only difference is that meetings occur with faculty and other students in seminar-style once per week at a scheduled time.   During the meetings, the students discuss what they are doing, provide feedback to other students, and generate ideas for future work.  The seminars provide a great forum for honing small-group presentation and discussion skills that will be essential after graduation.  Individual meetings with the faculty adviser are also possible by arrangement. 

Within these seminars, it is possible for groups of 2-3 students to work on different parts of the same large-scale project.  As an example, a few students might work together on a system for collaborative grading of assignments in MOOCs (massive open online courses) with one student developing the user interface, another designing the algorithms for assigning problems to graders, and a third implementing a system for integrating grader responses in the back-end server.  Every student is responsible for writing a paper and making presentations individually, but it might be possible to achieve much more with a collaborative effort than with a set of individual ones (the whole is greater than the sum of parts).  In any case, team efforts could be more fun and engaging for the participating students.  

The titles, faculty advisers, expected meeting times, and abstracts for the IW seminars offered next semester are listed here, and detailed descriptions can be found here. 

Selecting Good Projects

Selecting a good project is usually the most important and trickiest part of the IW process. 

There are many types of projects.  Independent work in COS may require a significant programming effort, a theoretical study involving the design and analysis of algorithms, or an applications problem in some other field.  No one set of guidelines applies perfectly to projects of all types.  However, that said, here are some guidelines to consider when choosing your project:

• Choose something you are passionate about.
• Choose a project with some aspect of novelty (a new app, a new algorithm, etc.).
• Choose a project with easy, medium, and hard milestones.
• Choose a project that you can complete in one semester even if things go wrong.
• Think about how you will evaluate your results before starting the project.
• Listen to your adviser when he/she suggests changes to the scope of your project.
• Do not choose a project with unresolved dependencies (e.g., data sets, software licenses, etc.).
• Again, choose something you are passionate about.

For more details and sage advice, look at Brian Kernighan’s “unsolicited advice on IW.”

Giving Good Talks

You are heavily encouraged to ask your adviser to review the content of your talk in advance of the presentation and to take their suggestions for improvement seriously. To improve your presentations, you should practice them, both alone and in front of others, before giving it during your allotted time slot. And take feedback on your posture, eye-contact, style and energy seriously as well as the structure, organization and content of your talk. You should imagine that the audience you are attempting to communicate to is a group of senior Princeton undergraduates in computer science. Since they are Princeton seniors, they are smart and have quite a bit of knowledge about computer science in general, but will not know the specifics of your particular research problem or area. Therefore, you need to introduce the problem and the reason you are doing your research clearly. You cannot depend upon your audience knowing specific jargon, nonstandard mathematics, the nuances of particular programming languages or the specifics of certain software packages. You also need to be a bit of a salesman or saleswoman -- you need to convince your audience that your ideas are useful or intriguing or ingenious or astonishing. You want to try to leave your audience impressed by what you have accomplished and hoping to hear more about it at a later time. If your talk depends upon research or results done by other people then, as usual, you need to cite those other people or papers or software products in your talk.

The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning 

The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning will have a representative in the E-Quad for Independent Work Learning Consultations.To schedule an consultation, please visit https://mcgraw.princeton.edu/undergraduates/learning-strategies-consultations-undergraduates/schedule-consultation. Sign up for a one-to-one session in the McGraw Center (328 Frist) at the link listed above or email mcgugrad@princeton.edu. The McGraw Center can also help with:

• Self-regulation and time management
• Avoiding perfectionism and overcoming procrastination
• Dealing with large projects
• Engaged and active reading
• Advanced problem-solving
• Effective note-taking
• Exam preparation

BSE Thesis Option

If you would like to do such a thesis you must follow the following steps:

• You must sign up for COS 497 in the fall and COS 498 in the spring.
• You must indicate that you plan to do a thesis on the IW Sign Up form.

If you change your mind about wanting or not wanting to do a thesis during the fall semester, keep the following in mind:

• If you decide that your thesis topic is not working out and want to switch into a normal single-semester IW project then you may do so with the agreement of your adviser by logging into the IW portal and changing your thesis to single semester independent work before the mid-semester checkpoint deadline. In your mid-semester checkpoint form, explain the reason for deciding to change from a thesis to a single-semester project.
• If you are signed up for an ordinary single-semester IW project and your project is going very well, you may switch to doing a thesis by logging into the IW portal to make the change from single-semester to thesis.  You must have the agreement of both your adviser and the independent work coordinator to do this.   You will only be allowed to switch into a thesis if you have demonstrated substantial progress on your topic. The deadline for switching is also the mid-semester checkpoint.  Again, in your mid-semester checkpoint form, explain the reason for deciding to change from a single-semester project into a thesis.
• An alternative to formally switching to a thesis is simply to do two consecutive semesters of independent work. In this case, the two semesters are treated like two individual courses. Each semester, you must satisfy the requirements for single-semester independent work. That means doing two written proposals, oral presentations, and papers (but no February draft paper and no Final Presentation and your two papers will be shorter than a thesis). The second semester may build directly off the work done in the first semester.
   

Grading Policy

• the creativity, originality, thoughtfulness and impact of student ideas
• evidence of research skills including analysis of research literature, the ability to learn new techniques and ideas individually, and the ability to accomplish research tasks, the ability to adjust to unforeseen obstacles during the course of research
• the quality, impact and originality of the project results
• the thoroughness of results evaluation
• the content, clarity and polish of presentations, including the oral progress presentation
• the content, organization, clarity, quality and writing of the project proposal and final report
• time management skills and on-time execution of checkpoints, presentations and reports

Final grades will be determined jointly by the adviser, second readers (for thesis writers) and the Independent Work Coordinators. Additional Computer Science Department faculty may read student final reports and help assess presentations.

Collaboration Policy

Generative AI Policy

AI tools such as ChatGPT are completely prohibited for use when drafting/writing a paper and/or oral presentation. Each advisor or IW seminar leader will determine whether it is okay to use AI tools for other tasks such as data set generation, coding support, etc.  In any case, all uses of AI tools must be documented in your reports, presentations, and any code you turn in.

Statement from Dean Jill Dolan Regarding the Use of Generative AI:
Our existing academic integrity regulations govern how students may use generative AI. As you know, Princeton requires students to state the work they submit in a course is original and only their own (RRR 2.4.3). Just as students may not turn in someone else’s work as their own, students may not misrepresent as their own work any output generated by or derived from generative AI.

Funding

BSE students will receive an email from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences regarding funding at the beginning of the semester. 

IW Students are also encouraged to review the Independent Work Equipment List for materials for their upcoming project.   All equipment/materials must be returned at the conclusion of the project.

Personnel

The IW coordinator(s) are responsible for overseeing the processes of the IW program and assuring their academic integrity.  The IW coordinators also determine the final grade with input from your adviser and other members of the faculty. Only the IW coordinators can approve any changes to deadlines, etc., so please do not ask anyone else to grant extensions or allow you to skip required components of the IW. Your research adviser is the person with whom you will most closely work over the course of your research. It is up to you to find your own adviser and mutually agree on a research topic. It is your job to meet all the deadlines for the course -- your research adviser may not even be aware of them. Do not ask your research adviser to grant extensions for the course -- even if they agree, it will not be honored by the IW coordinators.

Mikki Hornstein, the Independent Work Administrator, serves as the administrative contact for the course and handles many of the logistics. 

To contact the IW coordinators and IW administrator for questions of general interest to students about IW, please use the piazza COS IW site.  

Example Single-Semester Projects from Previous Years

Spring 2019

Richard Du, "Improving Interactive Image Segmentation with Image Preprocessing" | Adviser: Jia Deng

Paulo Frazão, "Applying Regression Methods to University Financial Aid Data" | Adviser: Xiaoyan Li

Lauren Johnston, "Predicting Crop Yield and Disease Trends in Central New Jersey Farms" | Adviser: Barbara Engelhardt

Maia Hamin, "'don't ignore this:' Automating the Collection and Analysis of Campaign Emails" | Adviser: Arvind Narayanan

Jackson Neus, "Bookish v2: Humanities Research at Scale" | Adviser: Brian Kernighan

Pulkit Singh, "Integrating a Gaussian Classifier into a CNN" | Adviser: Thomas Griffiths

Khanh Vu, "Coffee Delivery Robot: Collision Avoidance, Motion Fine-Tuning, and Fine-grained Localization" | Adviser: David August

Austin Wang, "Improved Transformer Architecture for Sequence to Sequence Translation" | Adviser: Karthik Narasimhan

Alice Xue, "An Acoustic Automated Lie Detector" | Advisers: Hannah Rohde (University of Edinburgh), Adam Finklestein

Yanjun Yang, "Comparing Formalizations of Proofs about Programming Languages" | Advisers: David Walker, Matthew Weaver

Example Senior Theses from Previous Years

You can download all previous senior theses from Princeton's DataSpace.