Project work- Do it yourself or Buy

Hello friends,

Today let us look at how to proceed with the final year project during this pandemic situation. The main aim of academic project is to know the expectations of the industry and the shortcomings of the students in their understanding. It aims at filling the gap between the student’s understanding and the expertise needed by the industry. Due to the pandemic, it’s not possible for physical interaction among the teammates and their guide on a regular basis and hence maybe mislead to buy readymade projects and submit. In this connection, I would like to attract the focus of the final year students towards the advantages of doing their project work on their own and what they will lose if not.

The Academia concentrates more on building better foundations of every topic that maybe useful in building the future as an engineer. The Academia is believed to build the knowledge bank of the students from zero to the required level. This process is taken up in two parts: conceptual learning and practical applications.

The conception learning begins with knowing the current status of the students and then stepping up stage wise. All the knowledge needed for the student to be a full fledged engineer cannot be taught in one phase. It's segregated into various subjects that, interconnected to serve the purpose. In this regard, appropriate syllabus is framed that incorporates all the aspects of learning assisting the students to upgrade to level needed. And the student learns the whole in pockets of various subjects.

These subjects, to the students, appear to be independent entities but in reality all are interconnected. The project work helps the students to interconnect the knowledge collected under various subjects to understand the whole.

The learning is incomplete if it is not supplemented with practical applications of these concepts. They are needed to verify the facts and then to interconnect the concepts to solve any given real time problem. But the problem with the practicals is that it has to be taken up under proper supervision. In the beginning, almost 80% of the tasks how to be done by the faculty member and only 20% should be allowed to be done by the students.

With the time, this ratio can change so that more and more tasks are made available to the students with the faculty members just guiding them. Anyway, full freedom cannot be given to the students as it may create some potential dangers. This doesn't allow the student to fully understand what is being done as most of the activities are just to be followed as per the instructions given.

As long as the student is on the campus, many faculty members and supervisors are there to take care. But this care is no more available when the student enters into the real world where instead of guidance and mentoring, the student faces competition. It becomes very difficult for any student to cope up with this immediate competition and cannot give full dedication to the work. The best way to solve this problem is to fill this gap between the academia and the industry before the student leaves the campus. Here the project work plays a vital role as the major activity is to be done by the student under the guidance of faculty member. Starting from selecting the field, the title and the design, It is expected to be implemented by the students Under the guidance of the faculty members. The students with common interest are encouraged to form the batches. The batch members then sit together to finalize the field of work and the title. It’s a time-consuming process and during all this period, the batch members are in regular touch with their guides. The guide assists the members of the team in identifying a common field of their interest.

Once the field of interest is decided, the team continues to look for an appropriate title to continue with the work. While deciding the title, the requirements are decided. The requirements, here, are the goals that the batch wants to achieve as the project.

The main aim of the project work is to ensure that the student understand how to interlink the knowledge collected from the various subjects and build something useful. Here, the various phases required to build project how to be analyzed and properly understood by the students. To build any project, we have to follow some methods in phased manner. It all begins with the requirements for the project work that is what the final project should look like. Here a list of all the requirements are prepared and properly documented. This document is revised multiple times before finalizing. The final version of this document is used further in understanding the requirements thoroughly and prepare more detailed documents.

The project building process he is undertaken in various phases

Requirements gathering
Understanding the requirements
Designing
Implementation
Testing
Deployment

Now let us see this phases each one in more detail:

1. Requirements gathering: In this first phase, the batch members sit together and prepare the list of requirements that the project work should meet. The requirements maybe

· Technical

· Financial

· And any other

The technical requirements present what is expected from the project work as an outcome. It may be input output relationship, functional details at the cruellest possible way.

Financial requirements may I present the bottlenecks in preparing this project work, various funds available

2. Requirements understanding: once the requirements are listed the next step is to go through them in detail. Each requirement is studied carefully and the details are noted. Wherever possible, these requirements are split into smaller ones so as two take-up each smaller requirement as a module. Various tools come handy While understanding the requirements. these tools provide Unambiguous details of the requirements. We must ensure that there should not be any ambiguity in the statements used for noting the requirements. This allows multiple people to understand the requirements in the same way and at different times the meaning of the requirements do not change. To ensure this some sign languages are needed for documentation because all the human languages do you have a lot of ambiguity.

3. Design: the smaller requirements split in the previous step are looked in more technically detailed way. Models for each micro requirements are identified and these models are interconnected to form solutions for the macro requirements. The concepts for each model that fulfils the micro requirements are identified and properly documented.

4. Implementation: Now it is time to implement the models for experimentation. Each model is implemented individually with all possible ways. The efficacy of all these options are measured and the best one is allowed to use further. Once each model is ready, it is time to interconnect them. The continuities among the models is properly shaped.

5. Testing: once each model is implemented, it is subjected to tight testing to ensure that it performs as per the design. All the tested models are interconnected to form the complete product. the testing is conducted on this overall product to ensure the performance.

6. Deployment: after successful testing, the project is ready to be deployed. Here the model is prepared in a way that can be presented to the examiners in an efficient way. it includes the appearance, Building proper front end, Report writing, presentations and so on.

Now let's see what we get from the project work:

· First hand information on how to convert an idea into a working model.

· Get full hands-on experience about all the stages of making something new.

· Understand the power of team.

· Learn to work in team.

· Allows one to take self decisions and discuss with the team members to convince them.

· Improved leadership qualities.

Now let's list the advantages of the team involvement in creating the project work from scratch:

· The industry prefers these experience and expertise from the students. This reduces their training efforts on the new recruits. And hence, the new recruit will be available for work immediately after recruitment.

· Hence, most of the queries during the interviews will concentrate on the students' experience during the project work.

· The real time experiences of the students during their project works will act as milestones towards their appointments. The failures experienced during the project building will be the stepping stones for success in getting the job.

· The experiences gained during the project work will come handy while understanding the operations to be performed during the work. This in turn reduces the lag in production.

The only relief with readymade projects is its simplicity. But it comes with many harmful side effects:

· No domain knowledge

· Cannot open mouth during interviews on the very first question, “Tell us something about your project”

· Lack of confidence

· Cannot cope up with the timeline during the work due to the lack of basic knowledge required to run the show

Another common misconception I would like to clarify here is that, you don't necessarily have to create something new or latest. To build something new about 400 eccentric engineers work together for four years and then they will be in a position to create something new. Now imagine what a batch of four or five undergraduate students can do in a span of three months along with continuing other studies. Yes, final year project for under graduate is not meant to create something new but to begin the journey of creating something. So when we begin definitely we start from the basics and not the other end. I mean we start learning alphabets rather than understanding the grammar used in Shakespeare’s play.

So friends, make sure to learn more while doing your final year project and nothing to worry. apart from your guide, many online services are available. make sure to use them all and begin your journey to build a successful professional life.