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.