Academic insights – 9 top tips for... projects

I'm Tim Coughlin.

I'm a lecturer in education technology

and a tutor in computing

in distance learning education.

Students will do a number

of smaller projects during

a qualification like a degree, but

towards the end they

very often will do a large

individual project,

and this will involve

them independently doing

a piece of work,

with the support

of a supervisor or tutor

to help them along the way.

You need to be guided

by your tutor or supervisor

in making those choices

because we want it

to be a good project.

But there is a lot of individual scope

for you to choose something

you're interested in.

At undergraduate level

the length of the project

is normally six to nine months

and three hundred

to six hundred hours of work.

So every project will start

with producing a proposal

and you'd want

to get this agreed

with your tutor or supervisor

to make sure it's suitable.

You then move on to doing quite

a lot of research around the area,

make sure you know

what you're going to do and what

information you need;

obviously then you'll be moving

on to planning the project

and then delivering it.

Towards the end,

you'll have to make sure

you spend a substantial

amount of time writing things up.

They've got to maintain contact

with their tutor in different ways.

So you might have

to email them,

or talk to them on the phone

and get used to doing

that regularly.

That's obviously important

to keeping you on track.

Projects can be challenging

for non-native speakers,

particularly if they need to do

a lot of research,

which is written work,

so they need to improve

their ability to read

a lot of documents.

So those are skills

they should be developing

as they go through their qualification.

One is that

it allows them to pursue something they're

really interested in, so they should

be building on

the advanced topics of study

they've learned as they've

gone through their qualification.

It teaches people

project management

and time management skills,

and a lot of those

would be important

in professional jobs.

If you were going for an interview

or applying for a job

you might have a piece of research,

a product

or something you've designed

that you can actually

show those people

and it will be a

substantial piece of work.

Go the distance.