After the Project

We encourage you to think about ways that you might take forward the work done by your project team. The formal course and assessment ends after you have made your personal report and ticks have been decided. Anything that happens after this will not affect your grade for Tripos assessment, but could have other benefits.

Some possibilities include: publishing your code as the basis of an open source project; contributing it to an existing open source project; starting a company to exploit the results of your work; licensing your code to another company or to a charity, school or other organization that might benefit; visiting your client’s company to promote or transfer what you have learned; being employed as an intern in the summer between Part IB and Part II; proposing a Part II individual project to further develop ideas; and many other alternatives.

If you do continue to use the work of the team in any of these ways, you need to ensure that every member of the team agrees they have been fairly treated. This will require discussion of who holds the copyright in source code or other intellectual property, and consideration of how any revenue should be fairly divided. It may be helpful to discuss these questions with your client, either at the final meeting, or by email afterward. The group project organisers can also advise if requested.

Whether or not you make further use of the results from the project, the group design project course will have been a key preparation for your future professional career.

During the project itself, your interaction with the client, your formal reports, and your personal reflection will have been a valuable learning opportunity in understanding the ways that the management techniques you have been taught can be used to achieve objectives, as well as applying your understanding of the methods and issues involved in deploying systems to meet business goals.