The bachelor’s project required at all Iranian universities can be a blessing in disguise. Here’s some advice to help you enjoy and benefit from your last days at college. It’s given as a list of important points to consider. Read on.
Advanced Course
If you plan to work on a more research intensive project, I’d suggest taking an advanced course with your project supervisor. This will give you some ideas and motivation to work on the topic.
Project Scope
Your main goal is a complete and edited report that is ready and printed before the deadline. Don’t get over-excited, over-enthusiastic, or over-confident in choosing the project topic and scope. Remember, you’re only in the learning phase of your research career and will have enough time to work on really cool problems later. When time allows only one step, a small step to a local optimum is favored over a giant step to nowhere.
Clear statements
Make sure both you and your supervisor have mutual understanding on the project specifications, deliverables, and timeline. Remember, s/he’s probably used to a special vocabulary when speaking with her/his grad students and colleagues everyday and may forget that you may not be familiar with the jargon. I was lost for days trying to figure out what my supervisor was talking about, asking grad students, searching the Internet — all to no avail. It’s best to keep asking questions until the problem is “crystal clear” for you.
Having stood at this end of the chain, you’ll be able to see why writing well is valuable. A good scientific writing has to be able to tell the most using the least number of sentences. You don’t want to waste your reader’s time with redundant sentences, and you don’t want to be ambiguous. Be clear, and take responsibility for the correctness of each statement. One of the graduate theses that I was reading for my project was ambiguous in many respects and contained technical inaccuracies. It was not only time-consuming but irritating to read, let alone build upon. Your bachelor’s project report can be a very useful document for other undergrads who might want to work in the same area, so keep that in mind when writing. Based on experience, I can tell you that papers with higher citations are also easier to understand. No wonder, right?
After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
~Frederick Chopin
