Nova has typically onboarded most new members at the start of the Fall semester. The open door policy allows students to join anytime during the year.

Nova Open Door Policy

Nova’s open door policy is our way to allow motivated students to join Nova any time. In short, if you can

Developers

  1. complete the onramp exercise on your own (certainly help from Google, but no friends)
  2. make a pull request to Navigator that contains a substantive contribution
  3. notify us via email: project.nova@utdallas.edu

Vehicle Engineers (Hardware, Firmware, Electrical)

  1. email your resume and/or portfolio to project.nova@utdallas.edu, along with your reason for applying

Marketing, Graphic Design, Photography

  1. email your resume and/or portfolio to project.nova@utdallas.edu, along with your reason for applying

then you will be considered for membership. These requests will be evaluated at any time by the Nova leadership, and we are also available to answer questions.


For developers, we can also provide suggestions on a contribution to Navigator (e.g., a new node that does a new classification task, like recognizing brake lights; or refactoring an existing node to use a different implementation; etc). Our github project is also public, so you can see what features or maintenance we plan to do. It is a lot of work, so give us a heads up if you plan to embark on the open door!

*Note - Nova members get access to our server. But having many students generate different docker images simultaneously uses up a lot of space, so we ask you to use your own personal computer for the onramp task (Docker can be installed on all operating systems). If you do not have stable access to a personal computer to complete the onramp, please get in touch and we’ll figure something out!