Final Year Project (FYP) Suggestions and Ideas

From time to time, I receive emails and concerns of students regarding Final Year Project (FYP). And we even get request for organizing events on FYP. At the start of the year, it’s mostly NEDians that ping us and in summer, students from FAST-NUCES, University of Karachi, Bahria University send us their queries.

And mostly these queries are related to

• What we should do in the FYP
• Can you give us any idea?
• What if we want to participate in Imagine Cup?
• We want to do something good in FYP.
• Tell us the technology on which we develop Final Year Project

So I thought maybe its good time to write a detail post on blog about what I feel about FYP and answer to some of the common concerns student raise.

Why Final Year Project Matters?

I always emphasize on the importance of Final Year Project (FYP) and we can say it’s one of the most important aspects of your degree. It is the point where you can apply knowledge or what you have been learning in the past few years. It is the point that creates an ordinary graduate vs. an entrepreneur. It is the point that creates meaning of your degree and your existence as an engineer. It is the way of getting exposure and experience of what real world problems are, if done properly. It will inevitably be used as a gateway to industry and to discriminate YOU among your peers.

What you can do in FYP?

Final year project usually span across 6 months to 1 year. I recommend you to take it seriously and do something hard, so don’t do just simple websites or simple ABC management system. Do something which you are passionate about and that makes you exciting, don’t get afraid, and accept big challenges. Utilize technology and go beyond what was not achievable before time.

Make a meaning: Try to solve real life issues, it might be big or small, but at the end of the project it must contribute in some manner to the society. Also, don’t delay it till the end of semester/year to work on FYP because in that case it will be nearly a piece of garbage not creating any meaning.

From my experience, I have observed that mostly highly praised projects are somewhat

• An implementation of research paper (after all computer scientist/engineer)
• A combination of hardware + software to solve a real world problem
• Project following Imagine cup theme and level
• Newest trend/buzz word/paradigm in the industry
• Working with organization to solve a problem, more than just an ordinary ABC Management System (Make sure you deliver them your project at the end)
• Integrate with online platform such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Code, Live etc to solve a great problem
• Unleash computing/storage power by utilizing cloud platform and achieve something that was not possible before Cloud/Grid

Also make sure the material and guide related to your project in available online, you may also refer to IEEE or ACM libraries and digital content.

Which Technology/Platform you should use?

Now this is very famous question. Computer Science/Engineering students keep asking about what technology/platform we should use such as Sun Java, Microsoft .NET or C++ etc. and it is pretty interesting question.

The answer to this question is that it depends on what you want to do in future. Perhaps at many occasion, I have instructed students to taste several platforms before graduation and let final year project be on platform which you like most. For example, Starting from a procedural language in first semester such as C, move to learn OOP in C++ and then in third year make a project such as networking and database using .NET and Java.

So what I mean from “It depends on what you want to do in future” is basically number of factors that you want to

• Continue your career in particular platform (probably because you like it or there are more job opportunities in it)
• Participate in any Software competition that might have some requirement. For example, if you want to participate in Imagine Cup you probably should go for .NET platform

Whatever reason be it for selecting platform, it’s always better to have your interest in it :)

I guess that’s all for this post. I will write few more posts on FYP such as participating in Imagine Cup, about FYP Presentation and some other FYP ideas you can work on. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask I will include them in upcoming post.