How To Choose A Project To Work On?

I received an email two days back from a student interested in working on a particular project. The idea for the project was good but the problem was that it was not viable considering the resources and equipments it required and what we have. The choice was based on sheer interest and did not take into account other considerations which are extremely important for the success of the project.

Selecting a topic for a project can be tricky at times (actually it is so most of the times). The objective of any project work is to instil into the student self-confidence and motivation to think independently and creatively, induce organisational, planning and management skills and predispose them towards a logical and scientific way of thinking. This has a huge impact on the career and the life of students. But unlike the popular belief, if the project topics are not chosen wisely and with caution, the failures may have a deterring effect on the disposition of students and may easily lead to frustration, despair and loss of interest in the student, exactly opposite of what one would want.  For this reason it is incumbent that the topics be chosen in such a way that un-necessary hurdles are minimised and the success of your work depend only on your own efforts. The following are a set such things which are critical to the success of your project and you must decide on them before initiating any work:

(i)         The most important thing that you should consider while deciding on any topic for your project is the availability and the accessibility of resources. You should have a clear idea, prior to start working on any topic, about the materials and resources available with you or easily accessible to you to use in your project. So it is best to prepare a list of these things.

(ii)         Next important thing would be the finance. Any kind of endeavour you undertake, it will always require some kind of financial contribution on your part. Everything has a price, be it minor stationary items like writing materials, papers, printing, files, etc. or some more costly materials like lenses, batteries, wires, etc., which you have to bear and therefore, you must decide beforehand how much you are willing to invest for your project.

(iii)           You must decide a time frame for your project : time in which you would like to have your project finished or you expect to complete a certain important part of it. It could a week or two deal, it could take a month or two, maybe even six months or an year. Decide your time frame such that your project work does not interferes or compel you to compromise with your other unavoidable commitments like your regular studies, assignments, etc.

If you skip these and start working on something without these important considerations, you may end up in a deadlock situation from where you cannot go any further may be due the lack of necessary materials, equipments, infrastructure, guidance or time. And then you will suffer from a negative psychological effect which one must try to avoid.

Once you have these things in place, you can start thinking of topics. Here too you will be required to decide what kind of topic you would like to work on: theoretical, experimental or something involving field work like a survey or a review article. The following a list of a few topics that should give you an idea of the kind of projects you can work on taking into consideration the restrictions and limitations of your resources : 

(i)       You can prepare an account on the Newtonian theory of gravitation which requires you to implement the three laws of Newton and the inverse square law of gravitation in a suitable mathematical manner and study its consequences. The pre-requisites are the basic knowledge of Newton’s three laws, Newton’s law of gravitation, elementary vector algebra, techniques of integration and differentiation.

(ii)      You can prepare a similar account on electric and magnetic fields, how do they behave in different material, how do the experiments lead to the famous four Maxwell’s relations in electrodynamics, their corollaries and limitations.

(iii)   You can also work on the special relativity, prepare a historical account, work out the experimental details, try to interpret the results such as length contraction and time dilation and their consequences.

(iv)       You can work on mathematical topics such as the ways to expand a function in to a series of polynomials or other functions (fourier series, etc.). These techniques are regularly used in physics, chemistry and mathematics and are extremely important from analysis point of view.

(v)     You can work on approximation methods used to solves equations or a set of equations, evaluate a function at a certain point. There are algebraic as well as graphical techniques. This also involves techniques such as extrapolation and interpolation in graphs.

(vi)      You can choose to work on topics such as chemical thermodynamics or chemical kinetics which will require you conduct a study on the processes involved during various chemical reactions and how do thermodynamic parameters influence the reactions.

(vii)  Advanced materials like carbon nano-tubes, nano-particles, nano-tubes, nano-fibres, nano-composite materials, etc. and exhibit remarkably different behaviour from their bulk counterparts. You can prepare a review report eliciting these behaviours and how these are being exploited for various applications such as stealth materials, wear resistant materials, medicinal purposes, water purification purposes, etc.

(viii)   Targeted Drug Delivery methods, one of the most important and hot topics of current research. This is a collective name for techniques in which the medicinal drugs get infused only in those parts of the body where they are required and then activated remotely from outside the body. Thus the drug affects only the infected portion and has minimum side effects. You can prepare an account of these techniques and how they are being used to deal with diseases like cancer.

(ix)        There are many biological materials which exhibit remarkable properties such as high tensile strength to weight ratio, anti-corrosion properties, etc. which people have not been able to synthesize successfully in lab. You can prepare an account of these kind of materials and how researchers extract them in lab and put them in use.

I have observed that students are pessimistic about the topics which require them to prepare a review report where they have to learn methods and techniques which are already in use, interpret theoretical results or experimentally observed facts and put all of them in a well organised report. Most of the students reject them as being un-creative or requiring no mental efforts. Well I must inform you that these kind of projects are actually very crucial and are highly vaunted by professors in institutes like IITs. Students undertake this kind of projects at MSc level in IITS.

The thing is, contrary to what most students believe, these projects actually require a lot of efforts on part of students just to understand what and how research is being done throughout the globe in a particular field. The reason being that the concepts, techniques and methods that are used today are very sophisticated and requires years of diligent training to be able to understand and use them. Working on these kind of review projects (also known as literature survey) serves exactly this purpose. It gives you the training and makes you conversant with what is going on in the scientific community and exposes you to real facts about what it takes to do a research, what difficulties do people face in research and how do they deal with them. This kind of projects also makes you realise your affinities: whether you are suitable for a career or not and if yes, prompts you to develop a suitable mindset as is demanded by any researcher. So contrary to the common belief in student community, review based projects are extremely beneficial and I would personally recommend all the students to undertake these projects if they are at all thinking of doing something in the vacation. People like Feynman, Einstein, Pauli, etc. all had done this during their teens. This will definitely help you to shape your career and make right choices in future (concerning your education) and also incite you to put in more efforts.