--- tags: msc_2024, projects, pgt --- # PGT Project Startup Guide ## for students supervised by Jess Enright 2024 ### Welcome! Welcome to your summer project. I hope it is a useful, educational, and fun experience for you. Ideally, it will give you a chance to show off what you have learned as well as giving you a chance to learn more in a particular area. I am Jess Enright, your supervisor for the project. I work mainly in algorithmic graph theory, with applications in infectious disease control. I have written this document is to give you an idea of how aspects of project supervision work with me. Of course anything I say that contradicts the Moodle page for the course means that **I** am wrong. Please let me know if you notice this! ### Meetings Because you are IT+ students, we have a required set of meetings over the summer - consult Moodle to see what these are. While the meetings are listed as running over either one or two weeks, in many of the weeks involved I am travelling for work, and so will only be available on one or two of the days. When I am in Glasgow, I am happy to meet either in-person in my office (https://hackmd.io/@magicicada/where-is-jess) or online. When I am out of the country, we will have to meet online. I would prefer communication and meetings on Teams. The Moodle page for the course provides a suggested slide or form to use for these, and a project tracker. I also suggest that you write up a few notes from our meetings each week, and include these either in the files associated with your Teams channel or in your git repo. For scheduling meetings, I will use an online booking tool that I will link in the section of this document on **Online tools**. You're welcome to book weeks in advance if you like a particular time. If something happens that means I need to reschedule (illness, student emergency, etc) I will let you know as soon as I can. There are several times over the summer when I will be travelling for work, but can still meet online on at least one day of the period in which we are scheduled to have out focussed meetings. ### Online tools For meetings: - If we are meeting individually: - book meetings at: https://outlook.office.com/bookwithme/user/59aec4b5ee4745648651cdbad5055b41@glasgow.ac.uk?anonymous&ep=plink Please make sure you book the right category of meeting for the stage of project. - When I am in Glasgow, we will be planning to meet in person. If this isn't possible for you, let me know. - If meeting online, use the Teams link created by the booking For communication: - You should have been added to a Teams channel I have created for my PGT students. If you haven't, send me a message - I prefer Teams messages to emails - they are better threaded and less likely to get lost. I also encourage the use of a number of online tools to help manage your project. In my experience of supervision, these can help make it easier for both me and you to keep sight of what is happening in your project. It will also help evidence that you have done your project, rather than plagiarising it. - My understanding is that this year you are required to use the school's gitlab instance. - I've had really good luck before with students managing their projects with a kanban board of some kind. If you like that kind of thing use it, and then we can use it during our meetings as well. trello is an option, or I use GitHub boards, I think there's something similar in gitlab. - Writing your final report: if you're using LaTeX, I recomment Overleaf - as with code repos I suggest inviting me to the document so I can access and read it. I've also had students use Google docs if that's more your style, or Word online. \textbf{I do not know if you're required to use the gitlab repo for your report} ### Settling on a Project You will want to settle on a project within the first week of your project. I work mainly in algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics, with some applications in infectious disease dynamics, so my expertise may not be related to what you want to do. You can get technical support from the GTAs, and they are likely to be more effective than me at this. Before the project starts I will have had a look at your tracker slide with project ideas in it, and commented. If you have not suggested a project, as a starting point, I have compiled a list of several possible projects: https://hackmd.io/@magicicada/pgt-projects ### Writing your report A few pieces of advice on the report from my past experience: - students often do not leave enough time for writing. Consider the marking scheme carefully, and recall that we mark mainly the report. - as below, I can give you some feedback on your drafts - more eyes on your report is usually a good thing! Friends, peers, etc. are a great resource for getting comments, expecially for identifying language issues. ### Feedback on drafts If I am able to give you thoughtful feedback on your drafts, this will result in a better end product (end therefore hopefully a better grade!). It often happens that students are not able to give me a draft in time to get useful comments, and this is a shame. I will try to give you different categories of feedback on drafts: - Organisation feedback on outlines: this would be feedback on a contents section, or an outline of sections and subsections, or perhaps even a paragraph outline where each paragraph is just one outline sentence. - Content and language feedback: this is about the content itself - if things are missing or incorrect, suggestions about other ways to visualise or present, etc. I can give fairly detailed feedback of this kind on one chapter if I receive it early enough. Feedback on additional text will be more limited. I will not be able to give meangingful feedback on any written work that reaches me after the 20th of August.