ORAL PROGRESS REPORTS TO THE COMMITTEE

Senior Project students give two oral progress reports to a faculty member in charge of PHYS 352, an(other) senior project committee member. The student's advisor is expected to attend this report. Firm due dates for each report will be announced a few weeks in advance.

Monitoring Progress

At each progress report, both the student and the supervisor should be prepared to discuss if the project is working out, if work commensurate with the agreement is being done and appropriate communication is taking place, and if significant changes need to be made. If there are difficulties with performing the work of the project, it is always recommended that the cochairs of the Senior Project Committee be informed as soon as possible. However, it is mandatory that this be done during oral progress reports.

Report

Senior Project students each have the responsibility of scheduling their own oral progress reports, including reserving a room ( usually the Miller Room, Roc 221, controlled by Pat Bacevice, or the small conference room off the second floor lounge, Roc 219A, controlled by a sign up sheet on its door ).  Both rooms are equipped with computer projection facilities. If necessary, a laptop computer may be borrowed from the course instructor.

A progress report is less formal than a normal presentation. Although it often helps to prepare a Power Point file, this is not required. You should, however, be prepared to provide drawings of your apparatus, plots of your data, any important equations you use, etc. Since you may reuse these items several times, it often makes sense to prepare them carefully in a Power Point or PDF file and have them available at each progress report.

You, (the student) and your advisor should have a very clear understanding of your project but you should not expect the Senior Project Committee members (or your colleagues in the class) to walk in the door and pick up from something he or she last saw weeks or months ago. Start your oral report with a minute or two of overview. In fact, it is often a very good measure of the depth of your own understanding to see how clearly you can explain your own project in two minutes.

Don't dwell on details. The progress report is designed to be more of an overview of the status of your project; the work you've done to date and your plans for the future. You should however be prepared to address all of the details of your project.

Expect questions. It is likely that you will be interrupted frequently by the senior project committee members. If there are no questions, that may mean that you have done a particularly good job or a particularly poor job - and the latter is more likely to result in no questions.

Although the talks to the committee are scheduled for 20 minutes, prepare only 10 - 15 minutes of material; the rest of the time slot will be used for questions and discussion. If you are using Power Point or PDF files, observe the general guideline that each slide will take about 2 minutes to explain, on average. So don't prepare more than 5-7 slides.

Talks to the students can be substantially similar to talks to the committee. However, you should (as always) remember to address the appropriate audience: likely you should expect less knowledge in your student colleagues than from the faculty supervising the project.

Actually, you can prepare more material but don't plan on using it. It's often a good strategy to come prepared with data, references and other resources that you don't plan to present but which might be useful in addressing any questions that arise.