Explore Your Professional Identity
This is a program to support you explore a topic that is personally meaningful and connected to your academic interests, professional goals, or intellectual curiosity. The purpose is to help you develop and communicate your emerging academic and professional identity while applying the knowledge, research practices, and critical-thinking skills developed in this course. Your project should answer three central questions:
- What did you explore, create, or experience?
- Why is it meaningful to you?
- How does it connect to your academic development, professional goals, or future interests?
- Investigating an emerging technology, research area, or professional issue.
- Sharing and critically reflecting on a meaningful academic or professional experience.
- Creating a program, prototype, model, visualization, or demonstration to explore a problem or concept.
- Applying a course concept to a real-world problem
- Exploring a career path and the knowledge or skills needed to enter it
- Presenting a distinctive perspective on a topic connected to your goals
Projects may take the form of an investigation, creative work, technical artifact, personal-professional reflection, or a combination of these. A project does not need to produce a successful program or polished invention. A carefully documented attempt that identifies challenges, analyzes unexpected results, and demonstrates meaningful learning can be highly successful.
Here are some examples from our previous distinguished students' work for your reference:- How to Prepare for the CompTIA Security+ Certificate Exam? by Ryan Convey.
- Enterprise Attack Simulation: Boro Manufacturing by Jordyn Bostick.
- Nature's Algorithm: Using Biology to Solve Complex Problems by Collin Bryan.
- Virtual Private Networks by Kevin Hubbard.
- Coding Solutions to the Philosopher's Problem by Nasir Jones.
- Tic-Tac-Toe: How a Simple Game Uses the OS by Abel Reyes
- Visual of 1-bit RAM by John M Zigrest.
- Exploring Codex by Ryder Hubbs.
- F1 Car ECUs by Dhruv Sethi.
- Linux Meets Robotics by Ritvik Sajeev.
- The Brain Behind the Lens by Dhruv Mirchandani.
Evaluation Criteria
When you're ready, you will be asked to give a presentation on your chosen topic. The project will be evaluated on evidence of meaningful exploration. The following criteria will be used to evaluate your presentation:
- Content and Understanding (50%): Presents accurate, relevant, and well-researched information; explains important ideas with appropriate depth; acknowledges credible sources; and goes beyond summary by applying ideas, making connections, evaluating evidence, solving a problem, creating something, or offering a thoughtful interpretation.
- Personal and Professional Connection (30%): Clearly explains why the topic matters to the student and how it connects to academic interests, professional goals, experiences, or future development.
- Organization and Communication (20%): Communicates a clear central purpose, follows a logical structure, and presents key ideas in a way the intended audience can understand.