Dr. Yinong Chen, Arizona State University
You can combine your honors thesis project with your capstone project in, for example, CSE423/424 or CSE485/486.
This is how normally it works:
Since the capstone is a team project, you need to find your team members and select a team project offered to your class.
Once you have selected the project, you talk with your project sponsor and request to do the honors thesis together with the capstone project.
In this case, the sponsor should assign you additional tasks within the project.
The workload of the additional tasks should be roughly the same as the workload of the capstone project.
The combination of the two projects should save you the time in preparation, such as learning hardware, software, and environment.
However, you should still have different work for these two projects.
Typically, the capstone project sponsor should serve as your honors thesis chair.
If your project sponsor is not an ASU faculty, you can ask your capstone instructor to serve as your honor's thesis chair and
ask the sponsor to serve as the second reader.
Of course, the challenge is to plan an individual project and a group project. The suggestion is that you try to take the leadership role
in defining the capstone project or project domain. Then, you can write your prospectus based on your definition.
Once the capstone project list is announced, you can find a project that is close to your honors prospectus.
Another approach is, you speak to faculty about your honors thesis advisor first. Then, you ask your advisor to extend your honors project
into a capstone project by taking additional students.
In this case, your thesis advisor can submit a capstone project reserved for you and your team.
If your project sponsor or the capstone instructor is not familiar with the process of combining these two projects and its requirement,
please refer them to the FHA (Honors Faculty Advisors). You can find the current CSE FHAs at:
Faculty Honors Advisors for CSE Students
Return to
Honors Resource Page