EPICS provides students with the chance to participate in real-world, long-term software projects in partnership with community service agencies. The CS department offers culminating experience credit for two terms of EPICS enrollment. EPICS is a great opportunity for CS students, helping them gain and put to good use many valuable skills, both technical and non-technical. Students are responsible for all aspects of a project, from planning to documenting to interacting with the customer. They must learn and apply (and often, teach each other) the latest technical knowledge in order to solve real problems. The work is done in the context of a group project with an involved customer for whom the project is important.

Some quotes from course evals ("what advice would you give..."):

• Take this course -- it is a great culminating experience because it pulls together all your knowledge of the last 4 years.
• You need to be motivated because you are deciding what needs to get done.
• If you want a project course that will give you complete responsibility and control over a system, EPICS is a good fit.
• Take it twice.
• Heck, take it even if you're doing a thesis.

Some general reasons for taking EPICS (in no particular order):

• Make a difference in your community, meeting the needs of real customers who care about your project's success.
• Experience a project life-cycle end-to-end and back again, through requirements, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance, and iterating as things grow and change.
• Work long-term with a group of your peers, gaining the experience of really depending on, and being depended upon by, others.
• Develop leadership skills, managing or helping manage part of a project, ensuring that objectives are met by proper planning, delegating, and follow-through.
• Interact with folks at a local agency, and see how the partnership helps both of you.
• Learn to communicate both written and orally, with the team or a subteam, new members, future teams, project partners, and outside reviewers.
• Be part of something bigger -- a project whose size and scope extend beyond the participation of any one member.
• Direct your own curriculum, identifying, focusing on, and contributing to aspects of a project most interesting to you.
• Make your resume buzzword-compliant, learning and applying UML, JSP, PHP, HTML, SQL, ....
• Have fun seeing pieces of the project puzzle come together, and getting to know others who are also doing this because it's fun and important.

Descriptions are available for the basic term schedule for each project, as well as the grading criteria.

Please contact Chris Bailey-Kellogg if you are interested or have any questions.