Best Ways to Select Final Year Project

This article highlights few of the best practices a student can follow while selecting & analyzing his FYP.

Role of Final Year Project

Final Year Project(FYP) is basically an academic task that describes any student’s skills and knowledge he has acquired throughout in his undergraduate journey.

FYP can have a big impact on your professional journey as well, It is assumed that most of the professionals get their first job on the basis of their FYP. The technologies used in FYP indicate that students had been working on it throughout the year and that is why it is assumed they have a better understanding of that technology. FYP not only impacts your technical learning but there are other aspects such as project management, meeting deadlines, collaborating with the team, helping & learning from others which is assumed really good professionally if a person is a team person.

There are various generalized approaches through them you can easily select the ideal FYP for yourself and each approach has a really thin line between them. Also, this article is more biased for students who are pursuing programs related to IT.

Approaches

Research-Based

It could be some tech that has not quite evolved but is considered revolutionizing tech for the future or maybe you know someone who has published a research paper and now it requires implemented solution or maybe further extension in the project.

On the other hand, it could be your interested domain in which you think you can invent a better approach which could be an algorithm or a technique that is more efficient than previous solutions.

Product Based (Startup)

It could be an idea that you had in your mind which can impact your society and can solve a real-world problem and you believe you’ve enough passion to pursue it later as well, It includes implementation of technology but the priority is solving a problem.

It’s a bit risky because you have to have really good cognition to know that your idea is good and can actually solve a real-world problem as a lot of undergraduates don't have that experience and usually norm is to work with a good company in the initial years of your career to gain the knowledge and then implement that in your startup. But still building a startup is known as one of the best and most efficient learning.

Hybrid Approach

In this approach you can actually target multiple areas at a time which can include something technically strong, Can be implemented in a project, and the technology mostly focused on your curiosity and what you actually want to learn throughout the year such as cloud, AI, Blockchain, development, etc. It can actually be a hybrid selection for technologies as well which can showcase all the domains which you want to specialize in the future.

This approach mostly focused on strong technical learning which helps you build a strong portfolio as well.

How did I choose my FYP?

At first, I was most inclined towards Researched Based Approach but then decided to go with the hybrid approach because I really wanted to explore different technical domains and also didn’t want to build something which I’ll follow as a business later. So I chose to focus on Artificial Intelligence, Development, and Cloud for my FYP and tried to learn and integrate the best practices of these domains.

Considering AI, I considered recommendation Engines which are mostly used in every platform nowadays and requires a lot of data processing at back and that is what I targeted to build something which Included a lot of raw scraped data and then data manipulation resulting it in AI-based recommendation Engine.

For Cloud, AI is linked with it because the scrapers and data pipelines needed a lot of functionality and scheduling on the cloud and I was really curious and excited to implement this all.

Considering Development, I already had a platform idea in mind that I can build and then integrate that Ai recommendation Engine with it. The platform was also backed by technologies that I wanted to learn such as Python(Django) for backend and Javascript(Vuejs) for frontend.

After Discussing and analyzing these all techniques with my FYP group we finally came to a conclusion about what we actually wanted to build. You can differ or follow the same technique as well.

Conclusion

Although all of the techniques have their perks and differences but they all can be used simultaneously with each other. It totally depends on how much you want to push yourself as FYP showcases your university’s learnings which are reflected in your future as well.

These are few approaches that I found while I was analyzing the possibilities for my FYP and It kinda worked for me until now. If you’ve any other technique which worked for you so feel free to email me raheelsiddiqui365@gmail.com or connect me at raheelsiddiqui.com