Project Proposal
Orion Haunstrup June 3rd, 2025 CSPB 3112 Professional Development Orion’s Professional Portfolio
Introduction:
When setting out to scheme up what to do for a project for this class, I wanted to do something that would sincerely help me with my future when I’m job applying. I have a number of recent past projects that I’m quite proud of… but no good or organized way of showing them off to potential employers. For this class, I want to construct a really good, flashy, colorful & creative, but also professional portfolio website that will let me truly demonstrate my research and CS skills to future employers. By no means will this project just be a dumping ground for past projects already complete! I’ll be fully re-tooling a souping up each of these projects to their maximum capacity. The projects are:
• A full data mining machine that I designed from scratch that takes in your choice of any active NFL football player, compares their statistics and their talent over all the years they’ve played with the full database of all past historical NFL players dating back to the 1940s, and spits out a prediction for what the future of their career will look like. This project needs to be fixed so that it can automatically update the data cube with new stats when a new season is complete. And I want to re-tool it to make as truly accurate predictions as I can get it to, using advanced machine learning techniques.
• A formal math paper I wrote in college. This one is cool and colorful and mostly complete. I might do a new draft of it and fix one specific proof I was unhappy with.
• A full math research website I run as a hobby. Outside of anything practical, I’m a devoted practicing mathematician working on one of the great unsolved problems. This website is all about the work I do. The website is mostly complete, but is currently only accessible by computer. I need to dive back in and make it phone-compatible.
• A colorful coding project I did for Data Structures class of a “rapidly exploring random tree”. This one is, again, fun and colorful, but has a few small coding bugs and glitches that I’d like to resolve.
Vision Statement:
At some point in my future, I was always going to have to construct a portfolio of work. I’m so thrilled and excited to get to do so in this class! I’ll learn a lot making a new professional website (taking constructive criticisms from both the students & professor in this course and from friends in the industry who are older than me), and I’ll be able to use this portfolio for the rest of my career.
Motivation:
We all know how tough the 2026 job market is. It’s going to take every ounce of effort, grit, determination, and luck that I can muster once I graduate to make it and thrive in the modern world. If this portfolio will help tip the scales for even one job, then it’s worth me pouring my whole heart and soul into and doing the best job I can on.
Specific and Measurable Goals:
The main and primary goal is to construct a good looking website. Beyond that, I’ve listed the above changes I want to make to each of the 4 projects. I hope to finish each of the fixes stated above.
Risks to Project Completion:
Time management is always a hardship for a full-time worker / student. All the rest I feel confident I’ll get done in time, but the rebuild of the NFL Project is a vast ocean of work. I’ll be able to get a quantitative numerical score for how good my predictive model is. At the minimum I want to improve it. But getting it to be excellent and dead-accurate might be something I’ll have to do on my own time over the next years.
Mitigation:
So long as I approach all this as the start of my future portfolio, then any amount of work on it is wonderful and useful. I’ll complete the website and the 3 smaller fixes, and get as far on the NFL Project as I can. This seems like a pleasant and healthy way to not lose my mind with how large a goal the NFL predictive machine is.
Project Assessment:
• Is the website good looking?
• Is the website professional quality?
• For each mini-project, how is the original project?
• Were the fixes made upon each one?
• How is the overall website and projects as a demo for future employers?
These seem like fair and valid grading criteria
Project Portfolio Link:
I bought the domain name for my website today. It’s going to be orionhaunstrup.com. Over the next weeks, you’ll see all my work appear there!