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msit advising
I get a number of requests from students asking me to serve on their master's thesis or project committees. Here's what I expect from you if you want me to give your proposal serious consideration.
Before I'll agree to serve on a committee, I want to see a well-written, well-thought-out proposal. Without a proposal, I cannot give you an answer. I strongly encourage you to take the proposal preparation class (4002-893)--you'll get guidance and encouragement as you develop your proposal, and a well-written and well-presented proposal is key to getting me (or anyone else) to agree to work with you.
For a project, in addition to describing what you want to do, you should explain why you want to do it. The project should build on--and extend--what you've learned in your concentration courses. That means if you didn't do a web development concentration, you shouldn't be proposing a web development project. It also means that you shouldn't be proposing a project that replicates the type of assignment done in classes--it should be more ambitious than that.
For a thesis, you should begin with a statement of what you want to research or document. You should have done a preliminary literature review, and determined what (if any) aspects of your topic have already been studied.
Once you've got your proposal ready, your chances of my agreeing to read it are greatly enhanced if I've had you in a concentration-level class (preferably a high-level class like web/database or XML), and you've done well (meaning "got an A") in that class.
Also important in getting me to agree to read the proposal, or serve on the committee, is the relevance of your proposed topic to my areas of interest, and the level of difficulty of what you propose. If you're proposing yet another e-commerce project, I'll probably turn you down flat--it's simply not my area of interest or expertise, and to be honest, it's unlikely you're going to do something that isn't already being done better elsewhere. I don't want you to reinvent the wheel, I want you to do something new
What am I interested in? Social software is a big area--from blogging to peer-to-peer tools to conferencing environments. I'm also interested in web services, but in support of social software and information-seeking, rather than e-commerce. Site like del.icio.us or Technorati are the kind of web services implementations I'm talking about. Or interesting tools like Mark Pilgrim's automated link-back script, or Shelley Powers' BackTrack modification to MovableType (the latter, by itself, would not be a full project, but as part of a larger strategy like her "Threadneedle" approach she describes in that post, it would be).
Another area in which I'm interested is content management systems--while blogging tools are one example of this, there are others. I'm also interested in new and demonstrably useful markup languages, or implementations of existing markup tools for interesting implementations (like FOAF, for example).
I seldom have "canned" projects for you to work on. If you don't have your own idea, and some enthusiasm about it, I probably don't want to work with you.
In your e-mail to me, you should (a) introduce yourself and remind me of how I know you, (b) provide a brief (one paragraph) description of what you want to do (and why), and (c) attach a copy of your proposal. If you do this, I'll respond as quickly as possible to let you know if I'm willing to consider it. If I am, you need to give me about a week to read the proposal and respond. If you haven't heard from me in a week, you can start badgering me (regularly, but politely, please) until I give you an answer.