The most important thing that you can do – after you’ve finished writing up your Capstone project Final Report or your thesis – is to make your work publicly available.

Three Useful Strategies – Pick One or All!

Strategic Choice #1: Publish and/or Present. The most time-honored strategy is to publish your work in a journal. That’s not always immediately feasible – it takes time, it takes money. (But if you can do that, go for it!) And alternatively, present at a conference.

Strategic Choice #2: Develop Your Own Platform. The next-best strategy is to have your own website, under your own domain name, and have one of the top-level pages on your site labeled “Portfolio,” and upload not only your Capstone report / thesis to that, but also all other reports that you’ve written while at Northwestern (preferably making them look professional, and not like a student report). And of course, that gives you a platform on which to host your FUTURE works.

Again, not always easy – it takes time; it takes learning some new skills.

Strategic Choice #3: Upload to Northwestern’s Repository. This third option is your “lowest-hanging fruit.” It’s the easiest thing to do – you can get this done within an hour or two, and there is no cost involved. (Strategic choices #2 & 3 each involve cost – journal publication fees, conference fees, or website hosting fees.) This third choice is to upload your Capstone project report / thesis to Northwestern’s own online repository.

Which Strategic Choice, and In What Order

As a first step – and as a top priority – upload your Project Report / thesis to Northwestern’s repository. As I said, it’s the lowest-hanging fruit.

Three good reasons to do this:

Easiest option by far. Hours instead of days or weeks (or months).
Cheapest option by far. As in, no-cost.
IMMEDIATE web presence – it’s Google-searchable. If you need to point anyone to your work, even if you are not actively “promoting” what you have – it is there, and all that you need is to give someone an URL – or someone who is looking for JUST what you’ve done can find you. Either way, it’s good.

You can visit the Repository at: https://arch.library.northwestern.edu/collections/s4655g83w

Uploading Your Capstone Project to ARCH

The following directions were provided courtesy of Dr. Noah Gift, Northwestern University SPS, MSDS program.

The Northwestern University Libraries provides a place to upload your capstone project for other scholars to view. This public collection of Data Science theses and capstone projects is a way to share your work academically and professionally. You can include any materials you wish to share, including written documentation, recordings, git repositories, README.md files, Jupyter notebooks, PDFs, or any other files that you authored as part of your capstone project for this course.

Upload your materials

Before you begin, you should first have all of the files you need to upload ready. If uploading a git repository, first download it as a .zip file from Github.
Go to the Northwestern Libraries ARCH website Links to an external site.and click “Get Started”.
Sign in with your Northwestern NetID and password.
Click “Deposit Your Work” and fill out the required fields including the title, description, keywords, rights, and license for the source code.
Upload the .zip file of the project (and any supporting documentation as .PDF, .MD, .TXT files, etc.)
Check the “I have read and agree to the Deposit Agreement” box and click “Save” to upload your work to the repository.
Contact Chris Diaz, the Digital Publishing Librarian, to have your project added to the Data Science Capstone and Thesis Collection.