The Capstone Paper

What is the capstone paper, anyway?

Prof. Shoop has created a nice guide to writing a technical research paper for computer science, and other good references are listed on the Resources page.

Generally speaking, the format of the drafts, rough and final, that you give to your supervisor will be spelled out by your supervisor. However, every required draft of your paper must have a separate title page containing the following information:

• A descriptive title for your project
• Your name, as you want us to list it
• Your capstone supervisor's name
• Your second reader's name
• Whether the project is for Mathematics and/or Computer Science
• A brief abstract describing your project

You may be asked to provide a copy of this cover page to the seminar instructors or to the department office.

The first complete draft of a capstone paper rarely is in acceptable form. Expect to write the paper in January (or before), and then complete two or more revisions of the paper before the April deadline. Even a decent first draft can be improved: ask for comments from your supervisor and pay heed to them.