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by dbalatero
5520 days ago
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As a startup person, I had to seek out the opportunities to build a product as part of a small team each quarter at UW CSE. That said, you can do it if you have the motivation. All the literature about the program mentions that you can optionally take 1 capstone course (which are the big project courses that let you have free creative reign over what you produce). My solution was to just do 3 capstones instead. I ended up taking the Google/Hadoop project course, distributed systems capstone, and Dan Weld's web services capstone. Each quarter I had 3-4 people on a team, and we were able to build something awesome. To me it always seemed like a problem of advertising the opportunity within the department, and encouraging big risky projects vs. focused, assigned classwork. |
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You were actually one of the people I was thinking of when I originally put in an aside about the really motivated people still doing it. I then removed that aside, but I probably should not have. The really motivated people are going to go into startups; they caught the itch at some point and need to scratch it to remain happy.
The subset of people that could go either way (startup or corporate) don't quite have the opportunity to see what a startup would be like at UW. The capstones are good, but for most they are an afterthought to be done in the final quarter or two, when they have most likely landed a job already. Software Engineering (CSE 403) is more about satisfying a requirement than about building something, and that is all most students end up with.