Waiting For An Idea For Your Final Year Project?

One month into the final year of college and people are already running around looking for supervisors for the final year project. All the build up suggests that life could turn out to be very hectic next semester. What really goes into a final year project? After a few days of running around and talking around with fellow students there's been a stark realization in my mind.

Big ideas presenting solutions to real life problems don't really work well for a final year project, especially if you are placed in a field as abstract as Computer Science. This should come in as a rude shock for some of us who still retain traces of those innovative ideas we had when we first entered college. I had the opportunity of presenting some of my ideas to the project coordinator and realized that there simply isn't enough infrastructure to implement anything worthwhile, at least from the point of view of a layman. It gives me a strong feeling that the next big thing in technology might never come from a University but from a Research Lab which is completely funded by the Industry.

Industry lending a helping hand to Education & Research is a very interesting concept because it seems pretty ironical that Industry should fund the progress of knowledge. I have always felt that the Industry is inferior to the Education sector simply because it is a by - product of the knowledge work done by educational institutions. Industry markets today what universities built ten years ago and they will no doubt cash in on the work done by universities today over the next ten years. Knowledge spawns Industry and yet all the truly defining research work seems to have moved to the Industry today.

Coming back to the issue of final year project, one thing which is very clear is that it is better to get caught in the web of abstraction woven by a project guide, rather than trying to solve a simple real life problem and getting caught in your own web without people to bail you out.

It all simply means that at any point in life hard work counts much more than innovation and ideas. Maybe it should serve us better to pick a guide and take his/her suggestion and then putting real effort into the project rather than whiling away time wallowing in our own ideas with nobody to reciprocate our spark.