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WHAT IS SENIOR PROJECT?

Senior Project is usually the capstone course where a student utilizes his/her knowledge and expertise that he/she has achieved through the curriculum. He/she will exercise his/her critical thinking ability and innovative ideas to do a complete project. Senior Project reflects the ability of a student to think beyond the box and to contribute significantly to his/her field of study.

WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE CREATIVE?

There are lots of issues, challenges, problems and limitations in the real world. Solutions to these issues are not readily available, rather need be created or developed. A student needs be creative in order to propose a new solution which is innovative as well as efficient. Also the development of human civilization is completely dependent upon creative works of scientists, artists, and people in every sector. The Senior Project simulates the real-life environment where a person would have to come up with new techniques, schemes, systems or philosophy. The text books can build the background knowledge of a student, but cannot build the career. It is the efficiency and creativity of the person that leads him/her towards distinction in real life.

HOW TO DO THE PROJECT? Step 1 – Investigate the field: The starting point should be an investigation of the field of a student’s interest in real world. Look at the challenges and issues prevailing in the field. Study the solutions that are being proposed by experts and check how they are working or expected to work. Also look at the research and development works being done in the field to understand how the future of the field would be or which direction the field is moving forward. For this purpose, a student needs to read research articles published in journals, magazines and conference proceedings. A student can also attend conferences and participate in discussion forums.

Step 2 – Identify a topic: The next task is to identify a topic of interest that the student believes he/she can contribute to. It can be a problem or challenge existing in the field, or may be a new development.

Step 3 – Analyze the topic: The student needs to analyze the topic he/she chose thoroughly to find out potential areas of development. A student needs to understand the problem very well before he/she is able to propose a solution.

Step 4 – Propose an innovative solution: The most important part of the project is to come up with an innovative idea on how to solve the problem or how to advance the field. First, it must be novel which means that nobody else has proposed such thing before. Second, it must be technically and logically correct and appropriate. The student needs to show the detail of the proposal through mathematical analyses, schematic diagrams and experimental setups, whichever is applicable. Then he/she also should demonstrate with sample results how the proposed scheme should work or perform.

Step 5 – Justify the proposal: A proposal could be very innovative and wonderful, but it won’t have a value if it is not viable in terms of finance, management and comfort of users. That is why a student also needs to justify his/her proposal and explain how it would outperform other existing solutions. The significant contribution of project work should be established.

HOW TO WRITE THE PROJECT REPORT?

Writing the report is a great deal of work which requires a very good knowledge and skill in the language. As it is a technical report, that does not mean that grammar, spelling and choices of words will not matter. The organization of the paper is also important so that the whole idea is presented very well and a reader can follow the paper smoothly and find the necessary information. A paper can be organized in different formats depending upon the topic and its contents; however, a typical paper format is as follows.

Paper Header – Choose an attractive title of your paper. The title is followed by a list of the authors and their affiliations.

Abstract – Summarize the work highlighting the topic discussed, idea proposed and its salient features.

Introduction – First, talk about the field and topic being addressed. Discuss on the issue or problem being dealt with along with a review of previous works in this

relation published in the literature. Then introduce your proposal in short and highlight the features.

Analyses/System Description – Describe in detail your proposed idea through mathematical analyses, flow charts and schematic diagrams, whichever is applicable.

Performance Results/Expected Outcomes – If it is a technical solution being proposed, carry out some simulation experiments with test data and show the performance results. If it is a system or a concept, describe how it would perform in real life and what the outcome would be.

Conclusion – Summarize your proposal based on technical details and expected results presented in the paper. Discuss on the limitations, if any, of the proposed idea. Highlight potential applications of your proposed idea.

References – List all the published articles, books and web resources that are referred to in the paper.

Acknowledgment/Appendix – If the project is supported by any fund, you may acknowledge it. Also if any institution or person other than those listed in the authors has contributed to complete the project, they should be acknowledged. In addition, if you have any detail mathematical or other kind of description that could not be fitted to the main text, you can list them in the appendix.