There are several benefits to sponsoring a cybersecurity senior project, including: 

• First-hand interaction with soon-to-graduate Cybersecurity students. You get the opportunity to evaluate the skills of our students before hiring.
• Complete a project at low cost. In most cases sponsors incur few costs beyond a small project fee and the time spent mentoring the students.
• Help the GVSU School of Computing know the cybersecurity skills and needs of your organization. This will help us improve our cybersecurity curriculum to better produce graduates meeting your needs.

• The students who work on these projects are undergraduates majoring in 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. We will work with you to appropriately scope a project idea if neccesary.
• Projects must be cybersecurity related, and have a clearly definable deliverable. Project proposals that are in other areas of computing, or do not have a clear end deliverable 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.  
• 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 minimum. Weekly meetings are 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, and provide their deliverable to the sponsor.
• The sponsoring company is expected to cover all expenses for required hardware/software that the School of Computing and Information Systems 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 confidentially agreement that establishes the sponsor’s ownership of all code and intellectual property generated during the course of the project.
• Sponsors whose proposals are assigned a team will be asked to sign GVSU’s standard Field Affiliation Educational Agreement which basically 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 beginning of the semester.

To have your project proposal considered, simply fill out this form. 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 cybersecurity work to be performed by the student team (either the system to be built, the system or process whose security needs to be tested, the policies/procedures that need to be developed, or other pertinent information depending on the nature of the project). 
5. A high-level description of the envisioned final deliverable.

The senior project course runs every fall and winter semester. 

GVSU Cybersecurity Senior Project Faculty Contact:

Dr. Dimitrios Melissourgos

Email: [email protected]

Phone: (616) 331-2048