Fundamentals of Cloud Computing Mentor and Project Request

We are once again looking for mentors for our cloud computing course, which is being offered at Boston University this fall semester, (September 5 through December 21).  We hope to have the final list of projects available to students by September 12. 

If you are an industry professional who is interested in proposing a project and mentoring a team of students, please respond via email to okrieg@bu.edu (with tmoran@bu.edu cc’d) preferably using the template at the bottom of this page.

If you’re thinking of proposing a project, but aren’t sure what one looks like, here’s the final list of proposed projects from Fall 2019: 2019 project proposals.

More details can be found below: 

For those of you who are not familiar: Fundamentals of Cloud Computing is a senior/graduate-level class that includes a semester-long capstone-like project, with the projects being proposed and supervised by an industry mentor. The projects are completed in teams of 5-7 students, who are expected to spend 5-8 hours per week on the project over the 13-week term, with presentations to the class every two weeks to evaluate their progress. Although some of the students’ time will be spent learning new technologies, in prior years many teams have achieved significant results, ranging from nice-to-have tools to (typically open-source) product enhancements.

We are looking for project proposals for next semester, of a size appropriate for a team of 5-7 students. The goals of these projects are to:

• Give students experience in web and/or cloud technologies
• Give them real experience as part of an agile development team
• (hopefully) Develop a useful artifact 

Projects are typically (but not always) open source, and students will share significant details of concept and design with instructors and the class as part of the evaluation process.

Students will rank their choice of project and will be assigned to projects based on preference and a skills survey. As a result, you should expect a team which is motivated, has some (hopefully all) of the skills you have requested, and represents a cross-section of class ability.

The students will have substantial course-based experience; many of the students will have co-op or prior employment experience, but if so it may have been as part of a large organization where others specified architecture and design. As a mentor your goal will be to help translate their academic knowledge and prior experience to help them elicit requirements and then design and build a real artifact to solve a real problem.

Mentors are critical to project success. We will need mentors with the technical expertise to help guide the students – you should have the skills (if not the time) that would be needed to complete the project, and be able to answer technical questions the students ask, or at least point them in the right direction to find an answer. The typical time commitment is about 2 hours/week, although often this can be shared between a technical and non-technical mentor. Meeting times are outside of class hours and are negotiated with students, and will be done remotely via Zoom. 

If interested, please respond via email to okrieg@bu.edu (with tmoran@bu.edu cc’d), preferably using the template below.

If you’re thinking of proposing a project, but aren’t sure what one looks like, here’s the final list of proposed projects from Fall 2019: 2019 propoject proposals

If you’re not sure of the exact description or background needed, feel free to put in a placeholder and we can fix it before classes start.

———-

* Project name: <name>

* Project proposer: <email>, <name>

* Will the project be open source? <yes/no>

* Full list of mentors for the project: <name>, <email>, [<name>, <email>…]

* Preferred past experience: – what technical skills will be needed for this project?

Rank each as:

– Required (for most or all team members)

– Required (at least one team member)

– Valuable

– Nice to have

* Project background:

– e.g. “software defined networking has had a profound impact…”

– if the project will be part of an open source project or a product, a link could be useful here.

– don’t worry too much here – if we don’t think the typical student will understand it, we will suggest changes

* Project description:

– e.g. “In this project you will build a new SDN controller…”

* What team members will learn:

– what skills & abilities will team members learn from completing this project?