GVSU College of Computing

• Help GVSU College of Computing understand your organization's needs, aiding in refining our computing and cybersecurity curriculum.
• Evaluate soon-to-graduate students' skills before making long-term hiring commitments.
• Develop stronger mindshare among students, increasing success in recruiting top graduates.
• Complete projects at a low cost, typically only requiring a project fee and mentoring time.
• Provide input that helps improve our curriculum to better meet industry needs.
• Get long-desired projects completed with minimal investment beyond mentorship

• The students who work on these projects are undergraduates majoring in either computer science or cybersecurity, typically in their senior year.
• The faculty coordinating the course will assign project teams consisting of 3-5 students per project. As much as possible, students will be assigned to projects based on their specific skills and interests.
• In order to ensure that the projects selected best serve the educational objectives of the course, the supervising faculty member(s) will screen the projects submitted by the sponsors in terms of relevance and scope. If necessary, we will work with you to appropriately scope a project idea.
• Projects must involve either implementing a functional software system or be cybersecurity-related, with a clearly definable deliverable. Project proposals that do not meet these criteria will not be selected.
• Each student is expected to contribute approximately 150 hours of work on the project over the course of the semester. Projects must be adequately scoped for completion by the team within the semester it is assigned.
• Companies submitting proposals must identify one of its employees to serve as its representative over the course of the semester. The company’s representative plays the dual role of customer and mentor to the student team. The student team will interface with the company representative to gather requirements for the product being developed. As mentor and domain expert, the company representative provides regular feedback and domain expertise to the student team. Given the mentorship role, it is important that the representative chosen by the company has prior software project or cybersecurity experience as either a developer, manager, or domain expert.
• It is expected that each team will meet regularly with its company representative throughout the semester. These meetings can be either face-to-face meetings or online/teleconference meetings. While meeting frequency is not specified, it is strongly recommended that these meetings take place on a biweekly basis at a minimum, with weekly meetings being preferred.
• During regular meetings, the student team will report progress to the company representative, discuss any obstacles or issues that need to be resolved, and present what they intend to accomplish by the next scheduled meeting.
• At the end of the semester, each team will give a final presentation of their work, deliver a final technical report, and provide a snapshot of the software or cybersecurity deliverable they have developed to the sponsor.
• The sponsoring company is expected to cover all expenses for required hardware/software that the College of Computing does not already have on hand.
• The sponsoring company should avoid submitting projects that are considered “mission critical” to its success.
• Ideally, proposals submitted should not involve classified or confidential proprietary materials. However, all students will be asked to sign an intellectual property waiver and confidentiality agreement that establishes the sponsor’s ownership of all code and intellectual property generated during the course of the project.
• Each team will establish a shared git repository on Github.com as the “home” for their project over the course of the semester. Sponsoring companies are welcome to establish a paid “private” repository (starts at $7/month) on GitHub if they’d prefer to manage the project repository themselves. An alternate approach is for the GVSU College of Computing to establish a private repository under its own organization account and then transfer ownership to the sponsor or sponsor representative at the conclusion of the project.
• Sponsors whose proposals are assigned a team will be asked to sign GVSU’s standard Field Affiliation Educational Agreement, which describes the responsibilities of both GVSU and the sponsor over the course of the project.

If your proposal is assigned a team, you will be billed a flat fee of $2,500 at the end of the semester.

To have your project proposal considered, submit project proposal. Proposals need not be long and detailed.  Our goal is to make the proposal process as lightweight as possible.

Basically you will be asked to provide the following information.

1. Project Title
2. Company name and contact information.
3. Name and contact information of the employee who will serve as its representative to the student team.
4. A high level description of the software system that will be designed and implemented by the student team. Include any necessary background information that might be needed in order to understand what is being proposed. Also include any specifics on the preferred development platform, if available.
5. A high level description of the envisioned final deliverable.

The senior project course runs every fall and winter semester. 

Please contact Dr. Jonathan Engelsma by email at [email protected] or by phone at (616) 331-2049.