There are many things that we we wished we knew before starting Senior Design 1. Here is a breif list to help out students that are about to enter the beast which is Senior Design.

1. Choosing a Project

If you enjoy digital, keep the analog to a minimum. We had the digital part of our project finished after the first semester, but we never finished the analog part. Also, choose a project that sounds interesting. If you can't think of ideas, there are plenty available in the past projects archive on the SD homepage. You can download the design document and read the "possible improvements" section to see if the project is worth revitalizing. Even if you aren't going to choose a project that's been done before, the project archives contain a wealth of information. For example, our site contains Visual Basic, Visual C++, and PIC firmware code.

2. Choosing an Advisor

Choose an advisor whose interests are similiar to what your project deals with. If you still can't decide, then choose Dr. Winton. You'll probably be asking him questions anyway.

3. Time Management

Set weekly milestones and commit to them. We made great progress during our first semester because we had very clear goals for the end of each week. However, during the second semester, we didn't set clear weekly goals, and productivity was not as near as high. The space in your schedule for Senior Design lab is a great time to have meetings.

4. MS Project

Every team plans their project differently. However, every team must use MS Project. This is actually more of a blessing than a curse. Since you are going to be graded on it anyway, then go ahead and make use of it. The most important part of MS Project is to spend a lot of time on the file at the beginning of the semster to get that first A. As soon as you get that first A, then MS Project will become weekly updates. The MS Project file is also a good place to store meeting notes.

5. Dr. Picone

Understanding Dr. Picone is a very important part of senior design. As you will soon find out, Dr. Picone likes email. He also likes status reports. We had already created our own project email alias before we were issued one. However, you can kill two birds with one stone by keeping Dr. Picone's inbox nice and full of status reports by using your project's email alias that will be issued within the first few weeks of class..