final-year projects....whoever started them should be shafted

As all of you might have inferred from my previous articles, i'm utterly turned off by my own final-year project, or FYP in short. A FYP is like, one hella of a GRADUATING project...Yeah, right. It's like a final masterpiece one would craft out before he/she graduates from a tertiary institution. Yeah, right. It's supposed to incorporate at least what you have studied throughout your course in school...Yeah, right. It's all nonsense if you tell me.

Try telling your future employer that you did research and explored the challenges in the microwave sintering of advanced ceramics and that you've learnt a lot and gained lots of exposure in the process. He would have died laughing at night just thinking what you had told him in the morning. Frankly, i don't seem to understand why one has to do redundant research and exploration just to graduate. I think it is just a waste of resources, time and money. The amount of time and effort spent on an FYP could be otherwise untilized in other ways. How much can one learn in carrying out an FYP anyway? More probably you would have learnt to use various equipment in a single day. Provided there are people who would offer to teach you in that single day. So, you would spend like a semester learning to use these equipment when you could have actually done it in a single day. Which brings us to the fact that you actually spend

(Number of days in Semester 1 + Number of days in Semester 2) - 1

number of days repeating the same experiment with minor changes here and there. That minus one is included for that day spent on learning the various equipment. Ideally.

People would always say the local engineers are not quite of the same league as that of their foreign counterparts. I can attest to that. At least there is me to add to the list. Broad-based learning. Everyone's saying it. Just as what i had learnt in Principles of Marketing (I'm an engineer dammit!), this is a case of having a wide product line of little depth. It's like entering a 1.99 shop that sells everything but nothing to choose from. Vase? Yeah, only that 1.99 vase. Potato chips? Yeah, only that 1.99 chip. That's the very problem of broad-based learning. It's just being greedy, if you ask me. Jack of all trades, but master of none. Consider this statistic: Out of 40 plus modules that you have taken throughout your course of study, at least 10 are irrelevant to your expertise. I've taken things like Film and History (i lurvvv that module), Principles of Economics (sux), Principles of Marketing (sux), Living with Mathematics (i'm an engineer, not a mathematician), Introduction to Nanoworld (now i'm a physicist) et cetera. Does it make me a better engineer? NO. Unless you are one wierd employer who wants to hire an engineer who knows a little of film and history. With broad-based learning, i'm neither an EXCELlent engineer nor a potential economist. Why don't they include Bus and MRT Etiquette and Manners in the curriculum? It might be more relevant than an engineer learning how and why the Central Bank controls the quantity of money in circulation.