It’s great to have summer vacations going but those of you who are looking forward to search ideas for their upcoming Final Year Projects, Consuldents will be covering an extensive range of topics based on the many facets of an FYP ideas.

However, we are also aware that the kind of experience students have with FYPs and the problems they face can be unique to the degree that they are enrolled in. Therefore, we will also be having blogs tailored to specific disciplines like the various fields of computer sciences FYP, engineering FYPs, electronics FYP, business administration, social sciences, and industrial design.

Today’s blog will focus on the types of FYP ideas that you can do.

If we zoom out a bit, we can identify several reasons for why universities exist. Historically, universities were sources of knowledge, and breeding grounds for intellectuals who would perform research into various subjects and phenomena and create or discover new knowledge.

Over time, as industries started rolling around, everyone realized that a lot could be gained from exporting knowledge and expertise from the universities to the industries in the form of solutions and improvements. In many countries, this link between the academia and the industry has grown quite strong, with industries regularly outsourcing projects to faculty and students that help them improve their operations, solve problems, and achieve their goals.

Given that, it becomes clear that you can venture into 2 kinds of FYPs for yourself. You can either do:

• A research-based project, or
• an industrial project.

We will now look closer into what each of these entails.

Research-Based Project

Put very simply, a research-based final year project idea aims to do what we described above: to create knowledge. There is no dearth of research being conducted in universities all across the world, with lecturers and professors toiling away in their fields of study, testing new methods, evaluating new hypotheses. The findings are consolidated into a research paper, which is presented in conferences and published in journals all over the world.

In the context of Pakistani universities, students who aim to pursue further studies, seek to go into academia, pursue doctorates, and conduct advanced research are encouraged to take up research-based final year projects and ideas. There are always a number of professors and lecturers in every department specializing in certain subjects, working on specific problems, and conducting research. They are always looking for enthusiastic students who wish to conduct research alongside them and publish research papers.

So if you are interested in this direction, you should waste no time in visiting all of your professors and talking to them about the research opportunities available. In this way, you will be able to sift through your own interests and figure out which opportunity attracts you the most.

The key thing to remember is that for a research-based project, the end product, the final deliverable is always the submission of a research paper to either a conference or a journal. This, of course, is possible once you have conducted the experiments of your research, gathered data, and analyzed it to draw conclusions.

Industrial Final Year Project

An industrial final year project, on the other hand, does not involve trying to push the boundaries of a subject. Instead, it entails developing a solution tailored to the needs of the industry, based on already existing knowledge. You will have to apply your engineering skills and knowledge to practice and come up with either a product or a method that helps the industry add value to its operations in some way.

Normally, people who are interested in working in the industry and establishing a career in that direction go towards industrial projects, because it is a solid opportunity for them to not only apply and test what they have learned over the years, but also to experience the problem-solving process that they will find themselves in consistently once they enter the industry.

The difficult part, however, is obtaining a project. Some universities and professors already have strong links with the industry and because of that have projects outsourced to them which students can work on. If that is not the case, the remaining option is to contact industries directly and build a relationship with them and that is where platforms like Consuldents are so helpful.

If you sign up at Consuldents, there are organizations who regularly post Final Year Project ideas with students in an online mode, which allows students to directly coordinate with the industries and collaborate on something which is new and industry specific and provides a brilliant opportunity to students to learn something all the while studying. The upside to this is that if you successfully complete a project for an industry, there are good chances that the industry will be willing to take you in as an employee.

So, an industrial final year project (for instance, will have as its final deliverable a solution – a product, method, or process) – that the industry will take up and use to add value to their operations. It will be achieved primarily by the application of existing engineering knowledge and concepts.

Ending Note

To sum it all up, the choice between the two final year project ideas for students depends above largely on the trajectory that you have in mind for your future. Granted, very few students have their lives figured out, but this is something that you should invest effort in. You should explore your opportunities and test your interest levels by doing a variety of things, so that you can gain an understanding of what suits you the best.

There are a lot of graduate student opportunities hidden in plain sight for you out there. Make sure you open your eyes to them before it is too late and yes, don’t forget to sign up at Consuldents to view thousands of final year project ideas or work on live FYP ideas with the industry.