Final year project/dissertation

I’ve successfully handed in my final year project/dissertation; I would have loved to read a blog about what is involved in creating an artefact/paper. I won’t be talking about the paper itself, more about the workload and how much time it takes.

I have 4 units each year, for us we only had 150/400% grades for the final year project (dissertation, viva, poster day and artefact itself). This meant that while I was doing the final year project I had exams and other assignments to be doing. Comparing to other universities that do the same course, it’s also sometimes 100% focus on 1 artefact in the final year. This makes it much more impressive for the portfolio as you have more time spent on it, but on the other hand there is a lot more pressure to pick the right topic.

That being said, even though it was less than half of the years mark, I would not under estimate the workload that is involved. I was very confident in the software and actually producing the artefact, but when it came to writing the dissertation I was basically on everyone else’s level.  My final paper was overall around 90 pages. It’s very daunting to think that you need to write that amount and keep good quality throughout the report. It’s not something you can do last minute. Generally when it came to assignments I did like to leave it late, but for this there is paper I had to make sure I was on schedule throughout the project. I was still working on it the day before it was due in, but only trivial. I’d say about 80% of people I knew where only starting the main thesis days/less than a week before it was due. I started months before but slowly started adding stuff as I went along. I would strongly recommend that you keep a personal blog post on your final year project. A few reasons for this:

•           It’s a perfect place to keep backups, access them wherever you are.
•           Good for informal notes and errors you encounter.
•           Easier to keep in contact with your supervisor, it’s an easy place to showcase your work.
•           Keeping a personal blog is fun in general; I’ve had a lot of success with my own with plenty of career opportunities out of it.

I personally had backups of my work on multiple cloud storage spaces, multiple hard drives and constant backups being made after every change in the project. I handed my final year project in last week.  

http://it-ca.net/blogsean/?page_id=1244

My final artefact can be found here, I may release my final year report too, depending on results.