Final Report and Presentation — Guidelines

Last updated:

• 13 April 2016 — Updated report template and instructions.
• 8 January 2016 — Original version.

Your goals

• Write a report that describes your semester-long effort on your capstone project.
• Give a presentation to your peers and mathematics department faculty on your project.
• Create an attractive poster that shows off your awesome work to future visitors of Chauvenet Hall.

The report

You can find a template (with instructions) for the final capstone report here.

Take a look at the template. As you'll see, your final report will mostly consist of information from reports you have written earlier this semester.

You should reuse language from your previous reports as you see fit. Make sure, however, that your final report is well-written and cohesive. You may have to refine or significantly edit parts of your previous reports.

References and citations

Use this reference and citation style guide.

The presentation

In your presentation, you will teach your audience about your capstone project. Your presentation should be 15-20 minutes long.

The content of your presentation should mimic your report to a certain extent:

• Describe your problem, with some background information.
• Explain why studying this problem is important.
• Briefly review the related literature.
• Describe your methodology (e.g. models, algorithms, data collection and preparation).
• Describe your results and sensitivity analysis.
• Describe your conclusions and lessons learned.

Select what you want to present carefully: remember that you'll be speaking to a fairly general audience who is not as familiar with your project as you are.

Here are some tips on giving an academic talk that you may find useful.

Other guidelines

• Each team member must give part of the presentation and be conversant on the whole presentation.
• The entire team must be at the front of the room during the entire presentation.
• Use PowerPoint slides (or something similar).

The poster

You can find a very rudimentary template for your poster here. Please use this PowerPoint template instead of Google Slides— this PowerPoint template has the right settings for poster printing.

Think of your poster as a "visual summary" of your project. You should be able to borrow heavily from your paper and presentation slides. Make sure to include some visuals — photos, diagrams, screenshots, graphs — that illustrate different aspects of your project. Also, feel free to play with the color scheme and make the poster attractive (but also professional). Take a look around the 3rd deck of Chauvenet to get some ideas.