Gemstone

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 09:08:47 GMT

Gemstone. A four year, interdisciplinary research project, in which you work together with your team and a faculty mentor to create a book-length thesis paper. It was not quite as advertised, but it's certainly not been boring.

We're on the verge of finishing our rough draft to go to our discussants for the thesis conference in April. Everytime I try to explain this to someone, they get a baffled expression on their face, and I remember that the gemstone staff seem to be the only people that have ever actually used the word "discussant".

In any case, my two main sections are sent in, and with any luck, we'll hit the 150 page required raw pagecount. I've been mostly preoccupied with getting our paper written for the past few weeks, often at the expense of my coursework, so this is going to be a great weight off of my shoulders once we get the final copy sent in. I've been spending a lot of time thinking, trying to figure out what to write. I've been having trouble writing portions of it, because it seems we're constantly having to redefine our project. Many times, I'll spend hours working, and end up with a half-page per hour or less.

This is not a very good position to be in -- I probably shouldn't have signed up to write the discussion and analysis section before it was clear that we would actually have quantitative results. Personally, I'm really not able to start writing until I have a clear idea of what I want to say. I could have hammered out my section in a few days, had I had all of our results ready. Things are especially hard because I had shared responsibilities for part of the project with a team member who dropped gemstone at the beginning of the semester.

Looking back, I have to say, it's been... interesting.

The bad

Four year research project -- it's not a four year project. You don't get to meet as a team until the end of freshman year. You probably don't get to have an actual meeting with our mentor until the beginning of Sophomore year. At this point, you are meeting once a week. You spend most of Sophomore year going from the hundred word project description you wrote when you were trying to get people to sign up for the team to a research proposal stating what you actually plan to do. During this time, you perform a literature review, and spend a semester learning about research methodolgy and thesis-writing from educational psychology graduate students. This class had a heavy, heavy bias towards the social sciences, and the research methodologies we were taught had little direct relevance to our project (since it was technical in nature). Instead of acknowledging that there was a significant disconnect between the material taught in the research methodologies class and those we would need for our project. We finally had a clear idea of how our entire project fit together about a month ago. At this point, we were shackled by time constraints, and couldn't really finish everything in the way we would have liked.
Interdisciplinary -- Our majors are: (me) Computer Engineering, (Phil) Electrical Engineering, (Cyrus) Electrical Engineering, (Nick) Computer Science. This is not interdisciplinary.
Team project -- We started with 6 members, and finished with 4. Other teams have 12-15 people. Our team felt less like a large-scale effort, and more like a small group frantically racing against the clock for the entire project. The team was a good group of people, but we were just stretched too thin. We didn't have the number of engineering man-hours we needed to complete the project we'd set out. We also had a severe lack of focus for the first three semesters of the project while we were trying to figure out what direction the project should go in.

The Good

We saw the ugly side of research. Instead of being spoon-fed a well-defined subproject by a professor leading a research group, we had to create our own, based on incomplete information, and without an initially clear grasp of the problems we faced.

We had to deal with team members leaving, with tasking sections to each other based on our experience and interests. We had to learn to function without a designated team leader.

We made it. We are going to finish the project, but it is not really the project we envisioned. It's not really what I hoped for, and I can't help being a little bit disappointed at our final product, but it's been a great learning experience. We started out too ambitious, spend a long time focusing on widely varied avenues of research, rescoped, looked at some more options, before we finally started our research. We then quickly realized we were running out of time, and that we had better start writing our thesis paper. We eventually ran out of time for this as well, and ended up having substantially less quantitative results than we had hoped for. I had presented a model for considering an electromagnetic attack at our draft conference presentation, but we weren't able to get real, hard numbers to plug into our model, so that had to go.

I'm frustrated that it has come to this, but I'm glad that I experienced the pitfalls of insuffecient project management on a fixed-time project instead of having a grad-school research project balloon to take semesters longer than expected, or be working have a specification-based deliverable fail to be on time or up to spec.

Of there's a lot more to be said (good and bad) about gemstone. Overall, it's a great program -- I'd definitely do it again if I had to start college over, and I'd definitely recommend it to others. I'm going to try and do a more complete and coherent writeup of my experience with the program, so that I can give some feedback to the gemstone office.

I haven't turned in my last two neural networks homeworks, and I missed today's artificial intellegence homework, which neither I nor tadrinth knew about. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

As an aside, I have absolutely no idea how it got to be March so soon...

Three months from now, I'll have an engineering degree.

Four months from now, I'll be married to the most amazing girl I've ever met.

Right now it is time to sleep, and I will sleep abundantly.

jaybiddlecomb

Gemstone