<aside> 💡 IMPORTANT NOTE: This section only applies if you are proposing your own project. If CodeDay is assigning your team a project, you do not need to follow this section.

</aside>

Before the program starts, you'll need two versions of a project proposal:

Short Project Proposal

Before students can be placed in final groups, they have to express their interest in projects. To do that, we show them a list of 20-25 projects/mentors which match their interests and experience, and then ask them to rank their top 5.

Your short project proposal is what students will see in this phase of the planning. We ask for 2-3 sentences which describe:

• What technologies students will use
• What the deliverable will be
• Why this is interesting or useful to someone

By default, we'll use the project plan you submitted when you first applied. If you want to change it, you should receive an email shortly after your on-boarding call with a link to edit it.

Project Plan

Before you host your first team meeting, we recommend you create a slightly more detailed project plan.

Exactly what level of detail you would like to use for this plan is up to you. (How would you normally plan a new project in your work?) Some things you might want to include:

• What are the specific deliverables, or customer stories, the project should achieve?
• What might the architecture of this app look like? (Is there a backend server? A database? Do you have preferences on parts of the technology stack?)
• How would your ideal team split up the work between 2-3 members?
• What does the big-picture gantt chart look like? (e.g. "weeks 1 and 2, two people will work on the backend and one on the frontend mobile app. week 3 will be integration, and week 4 is bug fixes and stretch goals.")

How much flexibility should students have?

The short answer is: as much as you'd expect a normal college intern to have. Here are some specific topics which might help you:

You should limit the choices of tech stack to what modern companies use.

Students in our program have the technical knowledge to complete a project, but they often don't know which technologies are used in the industry, or what patterns are used in real systems. (It's the difference between writing sorting algorithms, and knowing "most of the time just use sort().")