Final Year Advice

Most of the advice I am going to give here is stuff I did, and a couple of things I would do differently if I was back doing final year in university again. I'm breaking the article up into two areas, general advice, and final year project. I do this because I think the final year project is such a big part of final year it deserves its own. This is also primarily aimed at Computer Science students in N.U.I, Galway but could apply to most other courses with some slight modifications.

General Advice

Get past exam papers at the start of the year

Download, print, and bind all the past exam papers for each of the subjects you are taking. After course notes, I think they are the most valuable study aid you have. I've always printed out mine at the beginning of the year. This is handy because I don't end up wasting a couple of hours at the start of study week printing them and I can look at them during the semester to see what kind of questions came up on topics in years previous.

There are two places to get exam papers. The library holds papers from 2001 up until 2007 and they can be retrieved here. MIS has a new database for papers from 2007 and on and they are available here. If you want to get the papers bound go to the secretariat on the concourse, its pretty cheap to get done there.

Get your laptop in order

There are a few things here I'd advise you doing. The first is to clean up your laptop. You don't want a slow laptop and you don't want to have to do a reinstall during the year. Do it now and get it out of the way. Clean out your hard drive, make sure all you applications are updated. Do a reinstall if you think its necessary (if you are running Windows I'd say it's necessary).

The next thing I would suggest is sorting out some sort of a backup solution. There are a number of ways you can go about this and it all depends on what kind of redundancy you want and how much you are willing to spend. At the moment I use an external HD with Time Machine (OS X) for local backups and then Backblaze for offsite backups.

If you don't have your own laptop I would strongly advise getting your own. You will likely have your own machine in the final year lab but there are a hundred and one things that can go wrong with it. Things I experienced frequently were network outages. They were especially bad in the mornings and it was a pain to arrive into the lab early ready to get some work done and find the network was down. Luckily I had a laptop and could still log onto the Wifi network. I actually bought a Wifi USB adaptor and plugged it into my lab PC towards the end of the year so I could get onto the Wifi network if the ethernet went down.

Give adequate time to projects and assignments

This is something your parents would say but I'm going to reiterate it because this year, every mark you can get counts towards your degree. Outside of your final year project you will be doing a lot of other smaller projects and assignments, mainly in semester one. Make sure you make adequate time to get them done and get them done as soon as possible. Don't leave them late as a lot of them will be due at the same time (close to Christmas exams). For projects and assignments that are group based make sure you have fixed plans to get the project done.

Final Year Project

Research your project area well

When you first get your project specification, hit the library and the web and read up as much on it as possible. To do a good project you do need to know your stuff. Meet your supervisor too and make sure you know what they are looking for. You don't want to go in one direction when your supervisor is looking for you to go in another direction. Your supervisor is versed in the area of your project too so ask them questions and use their knowledge.

Use a source control system

You'll definitely be writing some source code and using a source control system will make life a little easier for managing the code. There are lots of benefits to using source control. The ones I found the most useful were the ability to work on the same source code on multiple machines (my home iMac, XP Laptop and XP Lab machine) and the change tracking features. I used source control when I was writing my final report too.

If you have a Compsoc account you could store your repository on their servers. Here are links to Compsoc's wiki articles on using Subversion and Mercurial. There are also a number of online providers and some of them are free for repositories that are under a certain size. The online providers may also be more reliable than Compsoc (it is run by students!).

Keep a journal

Keep a journal of everything you do in relation to your project. Document any research you do, ideas you come up with, algorithms etc. Take notes in meetings with your supervisor so that you have a reference of instructions/advice from your supervisor. When you come to write your final report this journal will help you immensely. You'll likely forget things you did in October when you are writing your report in February. The journal will have everything document so that you can refresh your memory. Its also a way you can show your supervisor that you are working at your project.

Start the dissertation early

Obviously you can't write your whole dissertation before you have finished your project. You can however start it before you have finished. The dissertations are basically broken down into generic sections no matter what project you are doing. They are introduction, research, design, implementation, results and conclusions. You could start writing the introduction and research parts around Christmas time. They will need to be continually revised as you are finishing your project but at least when you have finished and are starting to write the report you will have quite a bit written already. Personally, I found the introduction and research sections the hardest to write so if I had them already written, or part written, it would have made things a lot easier! I was able to write the rest of the report quite quickly though.

And there it is, my advice for students who want to do well in final year. Of course you should attend all your lectures and do all your assignments too.

Shane Tuohy, a recent Electronic and Computer Engineering student posted up thoughts on his final year. It is worth a read too.