Hi,
three years ago I decided a career change was in order so I enrolled in a course. I am now about to enter my final year in Computer Science and I am trying to come up with a project to work on over the next two semesters.
Basically I would like to do a project in the field of databases as I think it will be both interesting and also practical when it comes to looking for work next year. I have sent an e-mail to my local Oracle office asking if they have any projects/research ideas on the shelf that they would like a student to carry out for them.
However, I’m not uber confident of a positive reply from Oracle so I was just wondering if there are any experienced IT people out there with any thoughts or ideas? I have never worked professionally in the area of databases/IT so I would really appreciate any comments or suggestions please.
Approach local companies and ask them if there’s anything they need doing that may be suitable for a final year project.
With databases in a professional capacity the actual DB itself often isn’t the star of the show, it’s usually part of a larger application or project. So maybe you should be looking to work alongside another student or maybe think about doing a mixture of database work and some application development.
But then I left uni before my honours year so I didn’t do an honours project, just grabbed my degree and ran.
What does this mean? I have not encountered such a
thing as an “honours” year (or project) in US universities.
One thing I saw as a Computer Science senior design project
that involved a database was a system for amateur radio DJs
which would allow you to control your Shoutcast radio station
from anywhere. This sort of thing is ripe for interesting DB
connections… song lengths which will fill a certain amount of
time, songs with a common theme, etc.
Heck, there’s a lot of interesting searches that I wish could be
added to thesession.org:
Generate a random set of reels that starts in Dmaj, goes to
Gmaj, then to Em…
Find all tunes that have been played by both The Cheiftains
and Anuna…
etc.
Certain courses you can do three years of a subject and get an ordinary degree or do four years and get an honours degree. The difference is between B.A. and B.A.(hons).
It also depends which country you study in. Almost all degree courses in Scotland are 4 years with the final year being for honours (so I left uni after my degree year, 3rd year with A BSc instead of BSc (hons)). There are variations for placements etc, but generally that’s the norm. In England I believe the norm is 3 years with honours awarded on performance over the 3 years or something.
If you’re at all interested in languages and linguistics, you might contact ELRA (European Language Resources Association) for ideas and leads on EU initiatives. Lexical, terminological and corpus databases require lots of sophisticated database work going far beyond simple information retrieval, there are never enough programmers to go around, and funding is sometimes available.
On the music side, the ITMA has begun to bring some of their materials online. So maybe they’d welcome a project to help organise their huge backlog of holdings.