Re: Suggestions for Thesis work

[Todd Wilson <twilson csufresno edu>]

On Sat, 4 Sep 1999, Jason Tackaberry wrote:
> I'm entering my last year (finally!) of university, and I am investigating
> topics to do my undergrad thesis work on.  I was thinking: wouldn't it be
> nice if I could get my thesis credit doing work that I could give to the
> free software community?
> 
> [..]
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions you may give.

I'm sorry that I'm not writing back with suggestions for Jason, but
his question is one that I've been trying to gather information on as
well.  I have many students who come to me looking for good software
projects that are (1) feasible to finish (i.e., get to a first
release) in a semester or two, (2) good resume builders, and (3) part
of a larger development effort.  I happen to like Gnome, and so I
would like to push students to take up some Gnome projects (and get
more people involved in various free and open source projects in
general), but the biggest impediment is finding good projects for them
to work on.

It would be wonderful if someone could maintain a list of suitable
project suggestions.  These projects would probably have to be
self-contained -- it's hard to get thesis projects out of applications
testing, debugging, and miscellaneous hacking -- but other than that,
there are few restrictions.  (Jason's criterion of "sufficiently
academic" doesn't really apply in our case, since most of our
graduates go into the software industry.)  And, of course, it would be
great if these "student projects" could actually contribute directly
to the Gnome project as a whole.

-- 
Todd Wilson
Computer Science Department
California State University, Fresno