This page provides an overview of choosing a suiting research project at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign Digital Health Group.

<aside> 🔍 We want to ensure that you have the best possible experience when working on a research project. We therefore ask you to first read the Research Project Guide.

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How do I Choose a Good Topic?

An important aspects for choosing your research project are:

1. Enthusiasm to work on the project and a drive to work on the research project: Please be sure that you select a research project that you are passionate about and that you want to work on for a significant amount of time. If you do not find a project that fits your interests in the open topics section, feel free to propose your own project following the same steps as outlined in the Research Project Guide and on this page.
2. Be honest about your time and the effort that you can put into the project: Conducing research can be exciting but also a time-consuming effort. Be honest about your time availability during the project and directly communicate how much time you can invest in the project.
3. Existing skills and learning opportunities: A research project is an amazing opportunity to learn new skills and extend your skillset. Be sure that you select a project that provides you the ability to grow while ensuring that you have the foundational knowledge to get started. Each open project contains a set of links to get started with. Use these starting points to demonstrate your current experience and your ability to work on the research area.

The Open Topics page contains open topics that are currently available in our research group.

Each topic contains a set of links and first tasks to get familiar with the topic. These tasks help you to get familiar with the topic and demonstrate your existing knowledge and willingness to learn about the research topic.

<aside> 💡 Most of our current team members started as open-source contributors to some of our open-source initiatives. This is a great way to get started in all of the projects and stand out from the crowd 🚀

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Feel free to use the linked GitHub issues, projects, repositories, or documents to ask any questions and get input in your first steps.

Do I Have the Right Set of Skills?

We are a healthcare software engineering-focused group. This point we mostly need support in active software development for our expanding open-source ecosystem.

Most of the current open-source tools are written in Swift. We are expanding our Spezi ecosystem to include more web services, web frontend, and Android components to advance the scope beyond Apple platforms. We can only encourage you to check out some of our open-source work, including Stanford Spezi (github.com/StanfordSpezi) and active projects (Stanford Biodesign Digital Health Group (github.com/StanfordBDHG).

Our project backlog is a great way to pick out some first elements to investigate, get familiar with the process, and demonstrate some of your existing skills. The “good first issue” tag is a great way to filter for good issues to get started with.

We ask you to provide a first demonstration of your stills as part of some first PRs.

Here are some good first links to get started and familiarize you with the contributing process:

1. The documentation of our core Spezi framework and Spezi Template Application for Apple platforms.
2. Our general contributing guide, our Swift-specific contributing guide, and our code of conduct.