Chapter 13: The Final Year Project!

“Almost every engineer’s record of good and bad deeds shows that he/she cheated in the final year project of engineering”, said Chitragupta. “Two years ago I interrogated a group of engineers in this matter and they all shamelessly agreed to have copied from a friend from different college. That’s how they said they do final year projects in engineering in India. And they even ended their confession with an almost threatening, ‘koi problem’?

“Isn’t the final year project supposed to be a final implementation of your theory to show that you are a worthwhile engineer for the country?” Chitragupta couldn’t stop being amazed! Vidya was looking at me all this while, expecting a good logical argument to defend engineers from India. I tried my best to not disappoint Vidya! I offered to explain in detail what happens in a final year project in engineering colleges in India.

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Have you watched the movie where the hero gets shot in the brain, but continues to fight with the villain? Oh and he also defeats him, and then runs to the hospital, gets operated and the doctor removes the bullet and the tumour in his brain? Okay, even if you haven’t, this chapter has nothing to do with that scene, I just felt that it was my duty to apprise you of the existence of such movies and that you should not miss watching them before you die!

There is a saying in Hindi to hint at the ending of a difficult time or problem, “Haathi nikal gaya, bas poonch baaki hai”. Literally, the elephant has passed by, only the tail remains. The final year engineering project is that elephant tail in the four years of engineering life! You might have scored 65% in all semesters and must have grabbed a job in campus placement; but if you screw up in your final year project, then your job is gone for a toss!

So, what goes into a final year project? How are the various groups formed? What do students learn from the final year project? Does the final year project carry any significance in life ahead? These are a few questions that bug most students before they actually reach that point themselves.

The final year project is a proof that you are an engineer who knows how to implement the theories you have learnt in the past six semesters; that you have come up with a solution/ thesis that no one from earlier batches has thought of. The very first step to doing a project is forming a group. While you are a student you will be totally eclipsed by the misconception that the final year project will be a decider of your life ahead! And to do a faadu project you would want to be with the most intelligent of classmates. That is when the problem arises: your close friends from six semesters are not necessarily intelligent. You might have shared samosas, idlis, golgappas, etc., with them, but when it comes to choosing partners for the final year project, you will find that you have been ignored for the want of a more intelligent project-mate! This might happen with few, but this surely does happen. You will suddenly be jolted out of your happy-go-lucky world to see your best friend team up the intelligent classmates; you will have to hunt a partner for yourself, alone! You should consider yourself lucky if you are on good terms with others in the class and some group is ready to absorb you at the last moment. There will always be at least one student in the class that no one wants in their group. That student then goes to the professor and complains about the ruthlessness of the rest of the classmates. The professor then chooses which group that student will be a part of. Needless to say, the members of that group will behave with him/her like the commuters in first class compartment in Mumbai locals behave with an immigrant who mistakenly has gotten into their compartment.

After you have formed groups, it’s time for you to choose your Project Guide, i.e. the professor who will guide you through the final year project. You will write down the names of a few professors you want as your guide. Let’s say you have around 8 professors in your department, you write down the names of 3-4 professors you like. Out of those, one will be your project guide. The final list is displayed on the notice board in your department. You check the name of the professor against your group and that’s when you know who is going to screw you for the next few months! Cases have been reported of such project guide being assigned to your group that students did not expect, even in their nightmares! Then it’s not the guide who sees the students through; it’s God!

You spend the next few weeks hovering around your PG’s cabin waiting for him to finalise a topic (from a list of topics taken off the Internet) for your final year project. After a few more weeks, your PG will finalise on a topic that he thinks you guys will be able to manage or will be beneficial for him some time later. Every member of the group has a certain characteristic which makes him/her important to the team. These are kinds of students you will find in every team.

1)     The Jugaadu: He is normally a person who has big contacts via his parents or friends. He knows how to get material (brochures, industry manuals, etc.) from anywhere. His prime work in the group is to get all the raw material for the project. The rest of the group has to then chew on that information and finalise the content for the project. He arranges all the plant visits that his team might have to do to gather more and better information for their project.

2)     The Researcher: This guy makes sure that all the information available on the Internet and relevant to the project is made available to the project. These kinds of guys end up as software developers in IT companies later who know where to copy-paste the code from!

3)     The Typist: This guy, as the name suggests, is the one who is good at typing. These typing skills might have been developed gradually as a result of chatting on various social fronts, i.e. FB, Gmail or BB. This guy’s responsibility is to convert all the information available on brochures and other printouts readily available in the soft copy format.

4)     The Brain: This is the guy who drives the whole project. He has attended most of the lectures in college and knows what their project is about. He knows how to combine the theory with practical.

5)     The Salesman: Every project needs a guy who is very good at selling even the crappiest of projects that they end up making. This guy makes sure that their simple or useless idea is projected as a mind-blowing paradigm shift in the industry. These guys normally end up as sales guys after engineering and do very well in their professional life. They don’t need to do MBA in Marketing as they know that they are already very good at it! These guys tend to use hand gestures a lot and their faces change expressions more rapidly than a woman’s moods!

6)     The Clueless: Every group has this kind of a guy who doesn’t know where or how he fits in the whole group. Before he tries to be anyone from the above type, that slot is already taken by someone else who is more deserving. If you start talking to him about the project and his contribution to it, he will digress from the topic and direct you to talking about subtle distractions like food, women, drinks, etc.

To prove to the PG, yourself, parents and classmates that you are doing a faadu project, you will arrange a visit to a plant or a company and try to understand “something” that will be beneficial to your project. Till the end of your engineering, you will not be able to pinpoint what that “something” was! Most of the times, these plant visits are a matter of competition with your classmates. One group might contend that they paid a visit to the biggest thermal power plant in the state, the other might say that they visited the most complicated train signalling system in India, and so on and so forth.

After doing all this for a few months, the group will sit down and take a stock of what concrete information they have gathered for the project. Each one looks at the other and wonders who will break the bad news that you don’t know where you have reached! Just a month is left for the final year project submission and that’s when you do one of the following:

1)     Contact your friends from same stream but other colleges and ask them what they are doing and try to steal their idea.

2)     There are many freelancers in the market who will do a final year project for you. But that will cost you a bomb!

3)     Contact M.Tech students and ask them if they can give you guys some path-breaking idea for your project. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don’t.

4)     Take sad faces to the PG and tell him the truth that you have all the information in the world but you are not able to fit the pieces of the puzzle.

5)     Contact your seniors who ragged you when you were in first year and ask them if you could steal their idea for the final year project.

Applying one of the above techniques, you will somehow come up with a thesis and a working prototype. After finalizing the content of the thesis, the ‘Typist’ guy makes sure that the whole thesis is in a proper Word format. After the format is ready, it is the responsibility of the ‘Clueless’ guy to find out which printer will give his team the best bargain for printing the thesis. The thesis is normally in a thick black cover. The name of the project and the team member is engraved on that black cover in golden ink. Holding that thesis in your hands will give you the actual feeling of becoming an engineer. The biggest problem lies in presenting your thesis to your PG and the external examiner and making sure that the prototype doesn’t fail. The ‘Salesman’ guy in the project takes the lead and with all the hand gestures and chewing-gum-face gestures he convinces (or he thinks so!) the PG and the external examiner. The rest of the group is busy reciting verses from Bible, Gayatri Mantra, Ganpati Stotra, Hanuman Chalisa, etc., or whatever else they can to please their respective deities.

The final year project is the best example of a Murphy ’s Law being proved correct. If something has to go wrong, it will go wrong. While your Salesman guy is running the prototype, there will be a glitch which will displace your balls from the right place into your mouths! But as they say, God looks after all of us. Suddenly, after a few seconds of fidgeting with it, your prototype starts working fine and you all heave a sigh of relief. The PG looks at the external and the external signals that you guys have nailed it! It means that your thesis for the final year project has been approved. Your group submits the hard-bound-black-coloured copy to the PG and party all night! You wake up the next morning and many mornings after that to your mother’s voice asking you to repair an old fan that is not working, and your father needs your help because he is not able to start his scooter! That’s when you realize that you will never ever be able to enjoy the happiness of becoming an engineer until you solve all the electrical, mechanical, civil and computer-related problems at home! That, of course, you know, is far cry!