Good references (and their eventual letters of recommendation) are an important part of getting that first job or securing a strong graduate school placement. Project courses provide a key avenue for this important outcome in your CV and résumé, as you get to work on one with faculty members and their student teams. Devoting sufficient time, energy and initiative towards your project courses greatly enhances your ability to achieve a strong outcome in your project, and the ability of your faculty mentor to write a solid recommendation on your behalf.

Strong graduate schools (inclusive of NUS) generally have two separate criteria for admissions. There is a minimum standard for consideration, usually fanthomed from standardized test scores and undergraduate transcripts. After the consideration bar, staff or faculty individually assess applicants as to their fit for the school. This step is subjective and admissions faculty and staff do not just look at academic credentials but also examine the prospective candidates fit for the school, in terms of diversity and non-traditional credentials. The acceptance bar for graduate studies can be influenced by letters of recommendation from coursework and project mentors, as well as internship advisors. Hence, doing well in project courses is a good pathway towards graduate admissions. Publishing original work through a thesis or peer reviewed publication are also strong quality markers that world class doctoral programmes will consider.

Project and time management is a key factor in project course success. Unlike coursework, project courses do not necessarily have clearly demarcated deadlines and deliverables – each project is a unique mix of challenges, prior work and personnel. As such, coursework that has a much more regimented timeframe tends to be prioritized by students given their concrete deadlines. This means that much a project course progress may be best loaded to the beginning parts of the semester when deliverables for coursework are significantly less. Make sure to balance sufficient time for reporting and communicating results in a polished manner, as the communicated results are what evaluators judge you on and often not the effort made.

At its core, the research pathway embues students with the capability to do independent study: that is to take vague interests or challenges, formalize them into crisp problem statements and conduct inquiry to solve the problems. Research is also specific to subdisciplines of computing, and hence students will develope expertise in their area of exploration. These outcomes are important for jobs requiring independent initiative and skills development.

Internships complement the research pathway by allowing students to acquire particular in-demand skills and building their commercial exposure to real-world problems and career opportunities. This pathway can help students find a better match for the first career and often higher pay.

This is a personal preference, and this tradeoff is evident in certain areas of computing as well. While not exactly an answer to this question, often prodcution computing systems need to use heuristic tricks and optimization beyond core, elegant algorithm or theory in order to work at scale or within time-bounds.

We welcome additional questions to add (of course with their answers) to this FAQ. Please send your queries to the Undergraduate Office (socug@comp.nus.edu.sg).