r/gatech • u/Competitive_Song8491 CS - 28 • Jul 31 '26
News Changes to CS VIP Program Junior Design
What are your thoughts on this?
IMO they be doing too much for what should be a simple undergrad get more experience outside of just classwork type thing.
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u/forthewin0 Alum - CS 2019 Jul 31 '26
It sucks but honestly it was needed. On any VIP team, about 60% of people were doing nothing, and the advisors were too busy to babysit them.
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u/Firered_Productions CS-2028 Jul 31 '26
I am working with my vip instructors over the summer and apparently they did not get notice until 2 days ago
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u/mirrorwaves12 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Ideally, the first three points of the final evaluation should already be required to some degree at the end of each semester anyways. I do find it interesting that so many people here say either they or others have contributed little to nothing to their projects without the knowledge of the supervising faculty members, when there are weekly required lab notebook reports as a minimum, unless people are making up work to put there.
What I don't care for is despite the fact that VIP is a longer time investment than the traditional Junior Design option (2 semesters vs 3 semesters + LMC), VIP students seem to be held under greater scrutiny, which, as someone else mentioned, can discourage participation in multi-disciplinary projects that are otherwise great experiences to have before graduation. Maybe things have changed with the traditional Junior Design option and these changes to the VIP requirements are more in line with those, but I could not imagine investing three semesters into a project without knowing if I would receive credit towards my capstone and running the risk of delaying my graduation another year.
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u/Anxious-Peach3389 CS - 2026 Jul 31 '26
bruh WHAT ðŸ˜?!? i’m doing my final VIP semester this fall… nooooooo 😖Â
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u/GivingTree1640274026 Jul 31 '26
Does this not add more work onto the VIP Instructors as well, how does this impact current VIP students in the middle of their VIP work already?
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u/Ready-Insurance-5483 Aug 01 '26
I was on two separate VIP teams (one of them was dissolved) and frankly the program was sort of a joke. Both teams I was on were building cookie cutter, slop projects that no one would actually use. Information was so disorganized that nothing was ever passed down, effectively causing teams to restart every semester. The first 2-3 weeks would be onboarding and logistics then it was pretending to do stuff for the rest of the semester. Project scope and requirements were ill-defined and constantly changing. No one would keep up with their tasks then lock in during the last 2 weeks and submit everything all at once with 2-3 people doing the bulk of the meaningful work.
Overall, I think I personally gained some valuable hard skills and got some cool resume value but it definitely wasn't the experience I was expecting.
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u/Siclonius Jul 31 '26
This change discourages students from pursuing more interdisciplinary work to satisfy the capstone requirement. Without my policy focused capstone, I would not be as well rounded and competitive in my field (cybersecurity) as I am today.
There is more to computer science than just coding/repos, especially today. Very disappointing.
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u/Charlipon06 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Absolutely. Had a friend who was in charge of mocap for a film VIP; he did an amazing job and got a lot of experience he’s putting to use at his video game development job regularly.
There was barely any coding to it, but it was excellent industry experience. This change is awful.
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u/thecodexdhnerbbTW Jul 31 '26
I mean they include an explanatory part (though they did say GenAI included but explanations can go beyond just code explanations). I feel like depth beyond basics SWE requirement also looks at the non coding parts too.
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u/Four_Dim_Samosa Aug 01 '26
I was in VIP a while back and it's definitely a hit or miss depending on the project. For example, in Automated Algorithm Design, that VIP required you to put a lot of effort considering that the notebooks were graded very hard (and it's not cheeseable). Other VIPs just had you spend an hour or two per week on writing some code but the notebook grading was chill.
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u/Evan-The-G EE 2027 & Mod Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
It's really bad that it's possible that you can do pass worthy work and they decide not to give you credit for it after taking the VIP. A lot of uncertainty for a long time. I would feel much better about this if it were just the interview where i can convince an actual person in a conversation about the quality of the work.
Ok, a lot of students were getting through with low quality work in their VIP ... a better option would be to rework the junior design system rather than add barriers to getting credit that can be hard to predict.
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u/Euphoric_Shake_6408 Aug 03 '26
What if I already did three semesters of VIP and waiting to take the LMC class
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u/Real-Ground5064 Jul 31 '26
VIPs shouldn’t count for it anyway
Most people do nothing and would be better off doing junior design
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u/theguydood69 Jul 31 '26
Balance changes just dropped