CSCI 4830-800 (Research On-ramp) Course Materials for Spring 2026:
Office hours:
Tuesdays 1:30-2:30pm in person (ECOT 747),
Fridays 2:30-3:30pm by
zoom and at
other times by appointment; please email me if you'd like to arrange a
meeting time outside the set hours.
Class Materials:
- 14 January: Logistics, introductions, course philosophy &
goals
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Free-wheeling brainstorming
- Device-free thinking time
- 21 January: Choosing your research area and diving into the
background in that area.
Homework for next time:
- Stop by my office hours sometime before the next class to discuss
the ideas that came up for you during the brainstorming exercise.
In addition to the usual times that are listed above, I'm adding
some extra slots for these meetings:
- 10-11am on wed 21 Jan
- 2-3:30pm on thu 22 Jan
- 3:30-4:30pm on fri 23 Jan (by zoom)
- and 2:30-3:30pm on tue 27 Jan (but this will be untenable if everyone
leaves it until the last minute, so please don't wait)
If you can't make any of these times, email me ASAP, and no later than
COB on the 22nd.
- Read this short essay by Martin Schwartz entitled "The
Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research."
- 28 January: A deeper dive into how to do background
research and a bit more about how that plays into choosing the
problem you want to work on.
Homework for next time:
- Pick one of your ideas (doesn't matter which one) and find three
papers that talk about some of the research that has been done on
that idea. Turn in two sentences about each one, explaining what
that paper is about and/or why you chose it for your list.
- 4 February: Putting it all together: choosing the problem
Homework for next time:
- Go back to your three papers and do some reference chaining to
come up with a short (8-12 papers) bibliography about previous
research on your idea. Turn in a formal version of that
bibliography that follows standard scientific norms. You're
welcome to use any set of guidelines that you wish, such as
this one.
- Go back to your full list from the brainstorming exercise and
do some thinking about how you feel about all of them, now that
you've dug into the research literature a bit. Making some of
that thinking time "device free," as in the previous exercise,
will probably be a useful way to kick this off.
- 11 February: Finding an advisor, part I
Homework for next time:
Send me an email message outlining a project on the idea that has
floated to the top during the past few weeks and asking to meet with
me to discuss it. We'll schedule those meetings between 11-17
February. [Note: this is an exercise for the kind of cold-call
email that you'll need to execute to contact potential advisors.
Please don't use LLMs for this email composition task; we are very
much aware of the kind of tripe that comes out of ChatGPT if you ask
it to do this and you will not make a good impression if you do
that.]
- 18 February: Finding an advisor, part II -- and working
with one once you've established contact.
Homework for next time:
- Send a professional follow-up email to me about our meeting last
week to close the loop. Make sure it says something specific and
salient about the conversation at that meeting, your thinking since
then, etc. (Ditto on the use of GenAI here. Don't do it.)
- Dig through the homepages of faculty in the CS department to
see who does research that's related to your interests. Choose a
few (2-5) and turn in their names, together with a few sentences
about why you chose each person.
- 25 February: Writing about research, part I: Proposals.
Also a brief overview of programs at CU that support undergrad
research.
Homework for next time:
- Read through the "Project Proposal" guidelines in the "Individual
Project Grants" section of
the UROP page, which you
can find under the "Applying" dropdown, and start thinking about how
you'd write up a proposal to that program about your idea. (Here's
the
direct link if you have trouble navigating through this thicket of
webpages and dropdowns on that page.)
- Start thinking about what you might put in each section of the
proposal.
- 4 March: Writing about research, part II: Organizing and
presenting your ideas.
Homework for next time:
- Go back to the UROP guidelines and put together a short
research proposal following those guidelines.
The
"Proposal on One Page" page is a good one stop shop for this
activity. (Note: you'll have to make up some content here because
you haven't {\bf done} the research yet. Have fun but try to be
at least a bit contentful.)
- 11 March: Writing about research, part III: The anatomy of
a technical paper
Homework for next time:
- Turn in an outline of a technical paper on your chosen research
problem, with one sentence in each section. Again, this exercise will
require some creative but at least somewhat meaningful content
creation.
- 25 March: Creating research presentations, part I: slides.
Homework for next time:
- Create a short (2-5 slide) powerpoint or keynote deck about your
idea.
- 1 April: Creating research presentations, part II: posters.
Homework for next time:
- Create a poster about your idea.
- 8 April: Poster session (with Voodoo Doughnuts)
Homework for next time:
- 15 April: Creating research presentations, part III:
resumes and webpages. (Note: the physical design of my webpage is
pitiful. Don't model yours after it. You can do much better!)
Homework for next time:
- Build a webpage about you and your research and send me the link.
Make sure to put your resume on it.
- 22 April: Next steps -- internships, thesis, grad school,
careers, etc.
Homework for next time: