Industry sponsored final year projects

slyph

I will be starting my final year next September and I am open minded towards doing a final year project for a company.

Does anyone have any experience/knowledge regarding this ?

• Pros/cons?
• Would it be a regular occurrence ?
• Is my best bet just sending out emails and take it from there to see if a project kindles my interest?

Darr3nG

Your biggest problem in working with/for a third party for a final year project will be scope creep.

Getting a well-defined and documented set of requirements, early on, that satisfies both the customer and your schedule is going to be difficult.

I'd recommend coming up with your own project idea, something that interests you and that you can talk about during a future interview.


A few other pointers:

Try to get a copy of the marking criteria and focus your time and effort on maximising your result. Remember, the project is the one module which you have full control over.

When defining your project, keep it fairly abstract - use phrases like "a study of ..." or "an investigation into ..." - it's easier to record success of your initial goal.

Using (and documenting your use of) industry standards, like change control, bug tracking and unit testing, is a good way of increasing your result and padding the final report.

Saint_Mel

Long time since I done my FYP but we were advised to avoid company sponsored type projects.

Main reasons were that the project was to build up your own competence and show your understanding and skills rather than working towards a companys needs.

Plus we had to write our own specs and test plans etc which we were marked on so if there is a similar marking scheme you could lose out if designing to a company spec.

Also with coming up with your own idea you can take the project in whatever direction you feel will maximise you time, effort, skills and grade.

Edit:
Now that I remember it, our project supervisors were actually brought in from a company based locally but we were still encouraged to come up with our own ideas and to the best of my knowledge no project was in any way linked to the supervisors industry

Aswerty

Although I did engineering as opposed to comp science in college the norm was for doing industry projects that the student would have had an internship with the company beforehand. The project would be defined by the student and the company and an academic supervisor would assess the project and deem it acceptable or unacceptable for their final year project.

As previously mentioned project creep can be an issue in projects and software development is especially prone to it. I don't think this should sway from doing an industry project since it gives the student a more real working environment.

Remember you don't have to do an industry project for a software company. A lot of businesses can benefit through internal automation and this widens your pool of potential companies to work with.

I would stress that my college experience was in an electrical/mechanical engineering environment.

matrim

You would also need to check on copyright / ownership of the project and what the college and company have rights to do with any code or ideas you come up with.