Steps to failing your final year project

Two very important considerations when failing your final year project are a) your project supervisor and b) your chosen project.

I carefully selected a project supervisor with a well established reputation, the key aspects of his personality being that he doesn’t have one, he hates all students, he can’t talk to me with his eyes open, he once made a girl cry because she wanted to use a printer in the IT centre and is famous for answering all questions in lab with “don’t you know”, of course they don’t fucking know or they wouldn’t be asking you.

Helpful is defiantly not his middle name unless he has two middles name the first one being ‘extremely-un’. Another trait of his is constantly rescheduling meetings, well not so much rescheduling, just not turning up which is quite a feet considering they are in his own office, although one time he was kind enough to leave a note on the door. Add to this not replying to emails requesting a meeting and you have the perfect supervisor.

The choice of project also ties into the supervisor, the less your supervisor knows about the project the better. I chose a project involving a microchip and circuit board that my supervisor had had lying about his office for years, the project involves programming it despite the fact that the chip is not actually programmable. I made sure my project was so vague that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, main brief being “make them talk” followed by waving two of them in the air, despite the fact that they aren’t designed to connect to each other but only to a computer.

With a vague title it is important to propose an idea; I made sure I proposed one that was impossible so that I could spend the first term figuring out that its impossible. Then I got to propose another idea, which too would be impossible because you can’t actually programme the chip.

This sets a firm basis for failing a project, all that’s needed now is a little time management, bad time management that is. Its all about putting it off, problems always getter better if you put them off, its defiantly not about going to see someone about them, careful selection of your project supervisor should ensure that you are never tempted to go and visit them to get help. Although I did get drawn in by this temptation last term but luckily my supervisor put me straight by telling me that its too late for him to help me now, I asked him if he wanted to know what I’d done so far, he didn’t.

By this point I was almost tempted to go and see my tutor, but I stayed strong and kept on the road to failure, helped by remembering that my tutor has never said anything useful in the last 3 years, although it was interesting when he told us that the university owned canon park but I still fail to see what this had to do with exams.

Now all that’s needed is to work at it, the stage I’m currently at, going into uni daily and sitting in front of a computer, the danger is that you will start producing some good work but luckily the despair and hopelessness soon sets in. This will prevent any productive work as your mind is filled with worry.

From this point on it’s a doddle, your project will practically fail itself!

: 11 Apr 2006 17:03 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem