Okay, glad to know I'm not the only one in stockton with a Z. I own a 78 and after reading all these replies, I gotta hand to you because you have a lot of work to do. I graduated from Franklin and I drove to and from there on a 91 non turbo 300ZX so I have a little bit of history with the car. So now I can give you two possible options you can take. One, go for the swap. Now that you have month long breaks next year, if you can take the car home to continue working on it, this swap could be finished well before the project should be due but just make sure your body will be ok like everyone said. You're in CA so I wouldn't worry about rust as much but you never know. Restoring the body can take up a lot of time which you don't have. As for the engine, go to pick n pull. You never know u might strike gold and find a working 350 SBC and if you do, thats only $350-$500. How's that for your budget? The other option is to stick with the engine. L6 are not bad engines. Simply making it turbo should be good enough and upgrading internals should be enough for the teachers to give you a good grade. So as everyone said read the manual and do your research over the summer. Keep in touch and we'll do our best to try and help you out.