Students must complete 2 qualifying projects as a requirement for their PhD. One project must be conducted under the supervision of a faculty member with an appointment in the Department of Computer Science (professor, research professor, visiting, or joint appointment). The second project can be supervised by a different tenure-track or research faculty member in any division of the Johns Hopkins University, or, with advance approval from the department, by any outside researcher.
Before starting a project, students must submit a Qualifying Project Agreement Form to the Academic Program Manager. If the project supervisor needs approval (i.e., they lack an appropriate appointment at Hopkins), a copy of their CV must also be included with the form and work on the project should not commence until the department has approved the outside supervisor. Note: All project supervisors must have a doctoral degree.
Upon conclusion of each project, the student must write a project report describing the project in detail. The student or their supervisor will forward the final version of the report, along with the signed Qualifying Project Coversheet to the Academic Program Manager. These reports are archived and available for members of the department to view on request.
The project requirement can give you a chance to try out two prospective advisors and/or research areas. If you have already settled on an advisor, then the second project can be a way to develop skills in a related area of computer science or to experience the perspectives and working style of a different advisor.
Their advisor’s signature attests that a student has taken a well-defined piece of work from conception through execution to write-up and understands what is involved in producing a complete unit of scholarship in this area. This may be a relatively small unit of scholarship for the purposes of the departmental requirement, although sometimes a student and their project advisor may agree to target a larger unit in order to make the collaboration worth undertaking.
Note that faculty members may have varying ideas about the appropriate topic, scope, and duration of a project, so you should discuss this at the start to reach an agreement. The required Qualifying Project Agreement Form submitted upon starting a project is an informal contract of agreement on the project’s scope. Research projects often evolve over time, but any significant changes to the completion criteria should be mutually agreed upon. Note that it is an acceptable outcome for a report to clearly show that the original idea, when diligently pursued, turned out to not work.
It is your job to find faculty members who are willing to supervise you on projects of mutual interest. Often you will take someone’s graduate course before trying to do research with them. The idea for a project may come from you or from the faculty member. Multi-advisor projects are encouraged, as are interdisciplinary projects, but they must be signed off by the (sole) project advisor as satisfying the CS qualifying project requirement.
If a qualifying project builds on a course project, the work done for course credit should not be double-counted. A project may be abandoned if it is not working out; please notify the Academic Program Manager if this is the case.