The Silicon Valley Project Center was founded by WPI in 1999 to give
its students an opportunity to experience the unique technology environment of
Silicon Valley. The first student projects
were conducted during C-Term (January – March) 2000, with three projects and
nine students. Since then, we have
conducted projects in Silicon Valley every year, with a total of 14 projects
and 41 students.
The projects, called Major Qualifying Projects (MQPs), are generally
performed by fourth-year undergraduates.
The usual arrangement is to have a group of three students work on a
single project. In addition, a WPI
faculty member is involved in the project as a faculty advisor. For the coming academic year, the Silicon
Valley projects are scheduled for nine weeks, from early January through
mid-March 2003. The students work
full-time at the sponsor’s site during this period.
We are looking for high-level projects that will expose our students to
challenging technical issues. Since
they will be only a few weeks away from graduating, they are capable of the
sort of technical assignments that you might give to new hires.
The sponsoring organization, working with a faculty member from WPI,
defines the project. The sponsor also
identifies a mentor who provides the technical leadership to the project
students. The students are expected to
work independently, so the time requirements for the mentor are not
excessive. The mentor would not be involved
in grading the students, although he or she would be in touch with the faculty
advisor to provide feedback on the progress of the project.
The students are not paid for their participation in the project, since
they are receiving academic credit. Instead,
we ask the sponsoring company to pay a project fee to WPI to support the
students' expenses and the running of the Project Center. WPI arranges for the students’ housing and
transportation, and for activities outside of their project work. In addition, a WPI faculty member is in
residence at the Silicon Valley Project Center for the entire project period.
The first step in sponsoring a project is an expression of interest.
Since it may be too early to provide specific project descriptions, at first it
would be enough to indicate that you are interested in sponsoring a project (or
several) for students in a particular academic field. Then we would be able to proceed with recruiting students for the
projects.
Once we have brief project descriptions (a few sentences) of the
projects you would be interested in proposing, we will identify an appropriate
WPI faculty member who would then work with you to expand these brief
descriptions to a one-page description of the projects and to determine the necessary
background of the students.
Here is the timeline for the rest of the project work. We would like to confirm your interest in
sponsoring a project no later than the summer of 2002, and have project
descriptions finalized by early October, 2002.
During the period of late October to December, 2002, the students will
engage in preliminary project work at WPI.
Working with their faculty advisor, they will contact you to make sure
that they understand the project description and to ask any questions they have
about the project. During this
preliminary phase, the students will research the general area of the project,
study any background material they need for the project, and create a roughly
ten-page project proposal. This
proposal will describe a design for the project work and an approach to
completing it. Both the faculty advisor
and the company mentor will be involved with the proposal. With this preliminary work completed, the
students will be ready to begin work on their project when they arrive in
Silicon Valley in January 2003.
Additional information, including links to summaries of previous projects, is available at http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~dfinkel/Sponsor/index.html
The WPI Sponsored Student Project Agreement, to be executed by WPI and the project sponsor, is available at
http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/Projects/Forms/agreement.doc
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Prof. David Finkel Director, Silicon Valley Project Center Department of Computer Science Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester, MA 01609 Telephone: (508) 831-5416 Fax: (508) 831-5776 E-Mail: dfinkel@wpi.edu
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