As seniors begin to take on their comprehensive exercises (comps) a disproportionate number of them are working on Computer Science (CS) projects. The CS department will see 98 students working on their comps projects this year – the most of any major.
For CS majors who will soon be applying to grad school or entering an increasingly competitive field, their comps projects are integral to success post-graduation.
“If we didn’t have a comps project at Carleton, I would be very wary,” Amadou Touré ’25 said. “Because – especially for folks interested in industry – CS professors will tell you, it doesn’t matter how much lead code you do, it doesn’t matter how many hacker rank assessments you do, you will not get as much coding experience as someone who went to a four-year [research] university. It just won’t happen because that’s all they do every day, all day.”
Completing a large-scale group coding project can make a big difference for future employers. While Carleton students might have less experience than someone who went to a larger university, their comps project can uniquely “showcase the skills that transcend coding every day,” according to Touré.
For CS students, this impact on future employment adds even more weight to the already stressful project.
“It is kind of the main chance that we get to do a big group project like this, which – if you’re going into industry programming – is a big thing,” Gisele Nelson ’25 said.
The utility of CS comps projects after college informs the unique structure of comps for the CS department. While other majors have more freedom to choose a topic of their own or in a group, “comps in the CS department are group comps, so faculty advisors propose projects in spring of students’ junior year. And then students are formed into groups, usually between two to six people to work on those projects over either one or two terms,” Chair of the CS department Anna Rafferty said.
According to Rafferty, the department requires team comps both as a practical measure to accommodate for the number of students and also because “a lot of CS work in the real world is done in teams.”
“I think it’s pretty hard to escape working with people,” Nelson said. “And not just socially, how to work with people and how to manage meetings and stuff like that, but also how to share code with people… once you get a big group, you start needing to do the more complex things.”
The professor-assigned umbrella topics also simulate a realistic experience for the larger field of computer science.
“During this process, many of [the students] get the experience of having to investigate what sort of technology might work and then go learn some new programming language and new technology,” Rafferty explained. “That’s the kind of thing that they will definitely have to do if they are a software developer or working connected with coding or technology out in the workforce.” She added: “Because five years from now, they’re going to be using something that doesn’t exist now. So I can’t make their courses teach them about it.”
According to Rafferty, the assigned topics also ensure that students have a project that is of “the right scope” to produce something manageable yet impressive. She added that the topics are very broad and that “in pretty much every project, there are a lot of student choice points.”
“I think it definitely stretches you,” Aadi Akyianu ’25 said. “It’s like, yes, the theme is building hacking tools, but also, what counts as a hacking tool differs, and so there is a lot of potential.”
Akyianu, Touré, Nelson and Rafferty all noted that students are rarely unhappy with their groups and assigned topics. While the final groupings are assigned by professors, placement is heavily informed by student surveys.
Akyianu and Touré are both working on one-term comps entitled “Building Hacking Tools from Scratch,” while Nelson is doing a two-term project called “Stock Keeping in the Carleton Makerspace.”
Nelson’s project, like several CS comps, involves working with a client. For Nelson, the Carleton Makerspace is the client, but in the past, students have worked with different community partners like the non-profit Free Geek, Northfield schools and the Northfield youth center, The Key.
Other comps topics for this year include “Game-Playing AI for Contemporary Board Games,” “Computer Vision for Autonomous Driving” and “Evaluating Bluetooth for Ultimate Player Tracking.”
At the end of their projects, all 98 CS seniors will have a tangible product to show for it. Touré remarked that, while he was nervous about the workload of his comps project, overall, he was excited to see how the final product manifests.
“I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do at the end of the term with this tool. That’s where the nervousness comes from, because I know it’s so complicated. But yeah, we’ll make it happen,” Touré said.
