Senior design is also about helping students problem-solve beyond what they might be assigned in a traditional classroom setting, said John Aromando, also a lead instructor for senior design. Aromando added that another important aspect of the department’s program is its emphasis on tasks outside of programming, like documentation and testing, that are essential components of the work that students do while developing new software. 

“In theory, capstone should be the easiest course, because you’re just applying the skills you’ve built up over the last three years, but now you’re using those skills to address a problem that has stakeholders,” he said. “And while students expect that you do a lot of programming during your day, in reality it’s just as important to understand the environment you are working around and that you know how to navigate the business aspects.”

Real-world experience

This year, more than 100 computer science majors worked on 20 senior design projects, from a scheduling platform for the Pearson Hall Maker Space to coding a device that will travel to the International Space Station, for clients across campus and the broader Newark community. A new addition to the program this spring was the addition of a team manager, who was responsible for preparing biweekly reports and served as the main point of contact for the client, instructors and TAs. 

Senior Alma Rojas from West New York, New Jersey, was the manager for a project to refine the website for a Crow Indian Virtual Archive and Museum. Working for Cindy Ott in the history department, Rojas and her team were charged with updating an interactive online map and spent the past year updating the existing software platform so they could integrate new features onto the website. 

While certain aspects of the work have been challenging, Rojas has enjoyed learning firsthand what it’s like to be a project manager. “It’s a complicated back and forth, especially with coding where everyone is working on different things and you have to make sure you’re all on the same page,” said Rojas. “I find it really satisfying to get tasks done, and I like that the work is more people oriented. Initially I was thinking of doing a junior software engineering role after graduating but now I’m going to try to be an assistant project manager and work my way up.”

Disha Thakar, a senior from Wilmington, managed the creation of a Renaissance-themed gamified financial learning platform. Thakar and her six teammates developed an app designed to help fifth grade students learn economic concepts as they complete virtual “transactions” and take interactive quizzes for their client, Newark Charter School. 

Thakar said that the senior design experience has reiterated her desire to work in project management in the tech sector and is thankful for the opportunity to learn about working with clients while figuring out her own managerial style. “Oftentimes, I think people have stereotypes that software engineers are just coding away. But in senior design, you realize how much interaction is part of this process of being a developer,” she said.

Seniors Adam Kenney and Brendan Green from Wilmington and Donovan Messer from Newark worked on a data science-focused project for predicting the parentage of shark eggs. After developing a PDF file renaming program for downloaded scientific papers in the fall for client Jennifer Wyffels, a researcher in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, this spring the team was tasked with linking shark eggs to the female shark who laid them using a large dataset of egg characteristics.  

Kenney and Green, who led the machine learning component of the project, said that while the process of figuring out what model to use was initially challenging, it was rewarding to see the random forest model they ended up using have a 94% prediction accuracy. Messer, who was also the team manager, led the front-end development and worked on the data display options. 

“I definitely learned a lot about machine learning and about some of the use cases for the different machine learning models that are available,” said Kenney. “And while there were a few 180s that we had to do here and there, with some things we had to scrap, we still got to learn how to do things that we’ll be able to implement later in our careers.”

Green added that the opportunity to learn firsthand what it’s like to work for a client and to see how sprints are implemented was “really beneficial” for his career. “You get to see what it’s actually going to be like in the corporate world. It’s not just a group project in a class, with exact metrics to follow and a rubric — it’s up to you to figure out what is best, explain that to the client, get feedback and see where to go from there,” Green said.

Technical and professional development

Silber and Keffer said that the goal for future iterations of the senior design program is to bring in additional external clients and partners from industry. That way, students can have even more opportunities to make connections with potential employers and learn more about the ins and outs of software development in the real world. 

“By solving real world problems using teamwork, students in computer science have the unique opportunity to apply what they learned in the classroom to address challenges, sometimes needing to fill the gap between theoretical knowledge and real, applicable solutions,” said Weisong Shi, department chair. “By working with our industry partners and computer science communities, in the future we aim to have 50% of our senior design projects funded. This will allow our students to gain real, problem-solving experience by working with mentors from the industry in this year-long project.”

Added Keffer, “We also want to expand our classroom program with things like resume building exercises and having managers conduct interviews for team members to give students additional experiences that they will have in the workplace.” 

Aromando said he hopes that senior design continues to provide students with an understanding of the working world, both in terms of the workflow and project management aspects as well as how to professionally navigate through difficult situations. “Students train hard on technical aspects, but the typical software engineering job is not dominated by showing off technical skills. The people who succeed and get promoted are the ones who also have good soft skills,” he said. 

Messer said that one of his biggest takeaways was how to deal with frustrating circumstances in a professional setting. “You learn to be really flexible,” Messer said. “When you work on something and you can’t use it, because of a miscommunication or because the work went in a different direction, it can be frustrating. But you have to learn to let it go, to roll with the punches, and say ‘the client wants this, so we have to shift direction and get it done.’” 

Keffer added, “They’ve been writing code since starting, that’s not the hard part about being a software engineer. Being able to sit down with target users, figure out this is the problem, this is what they want, and being able to explain succinctly what’s going on and to give them something that does what they need it to do is the big part of the job.”