`BMW i3 carbon fiber automobile design`

Mentioned as the worked example of a paper topic that is right at the boundary of "too broad" but worked because the student had thirty hours of prior study.

The requirements of the course: no quizzes, no finals. Submission of a proposed paper topic — you've got twelve days. If you say you're going to talk about designing automobiles, I'm going to reject it as too broad. If you say you want to talk about designing a carbon-fiber automobile like the BMW i3 — probably still pretty broad, but a student did it and did a great job on it, partly because they'd been studying it for some time. They did a great job because it wasn't something they just did ten hours on; they'd probably done thirty hours before, and they talked about something they were interested in.