Since you clicked on this article you’re probably a senior student doing his last year of college thinking that you got a slightly interesting graduation project.
And we’re here to make it brought up in a lot more conversations.
but here is where you overlook the factors that make any project interesting to discuss:
1- Is it an easy plug and play solution you can find online? If you answer yes, then this isn’t a good start
2- Does it include the interaction of different software technologies? and to what extent?
3- Does it have a cause of existence or are we flexing our potential software capabilities?
You can follow along this article for each step with an example provided between parentheses (Our Project)
So let’s assume for starters that the main idea for your thesis was a plug and play solution (i.e. facial recognition) that can be easily reproduced from any online repository. How can you go about making it interesting?
- Don’t recreate the bicycle, make it yours, create additional features (low light recognition, side profile data, etc.)
- Present your main idea packaged with proper plugins, other software integrations. (Create API calls and integrate it with a web app)
This part is for those developers who tunnel vision on the main function of their product while forgetting how users should be easily accessing this function, you’re creating a great meal with no spoons. you won’t get any reviews there.
- Keep your idea simple, don’t go for options with complex architecture, because much as we appreciate the engineering ingenuity, complications are created only as a way to avoid obstacles. (for our example: don’t use microservices if your app can run without high throughput and availability)
As much as you’d think senior developers can be impressed with your use of microservices for scalability and performance, they can easily devalue this choice because of the wrong use of certain technology. because while you wasted 30% more time deploying these microservices, your application was functioning reliably fast already and could have used the extra time fine tuning its functions and experience.
Once you get to this stage, it’s all about presentation to get the proper support and attention you deserve for your interesting addition.
First off, you need to know that people in tech like talking about trending topics so the closer you are to whatever is going on in the world you’d have a better shot at making a crowd for yourself.
but even if you don’t have the trendy ideas needed for instant attraction, you can always create your own trend if your project can prove it novelty through the right wording.
Here’s how to word it:
Instead of following the normal pattern (title —tools — purpose) you can use the product announcement pattern (purpose — relevant tools — title) which is commonly used to raise interest in the first 30 seconds before their attention starts to deteriorate.
We’re creating automatic detection systems that can alert you about strangers inside your house using ML models that can operate in low light and suboptimal conditions — This already sounds so much better as a conversation starter!
Attracting mentors/sponsors for your thesis is a different struggle altogether because they’ve seen so much ideas similar to yours, you need to study their background and what projects do they work with, seeing their tools or difficulty level can give you insight on what are they expecting and what can spark interest when contacting them through Email/LinkedIn.
Here’s the trick:
If you’re a competitor in a certain industry, you’re blind to what your product lacks, but if some engineer approaches your business with a similar product but with an extra feature that adds to your market value substantially. You’ll probably buy that product just to adopt that feature to yours.
What I’m basically saying is, your project might have been done many times, but one feature might be enough to make it interesting, and of course don’t forget to add that feature in the start of your project presentation
You might not have the technology/resources of having a full product implementation so my suggestion in that case is to do open source contribution using your time, that’s what gets people to bring up your idea, not the lines of code you can type, but the efficiency and knowledge to develop something on someone’s software and to make a jigsaw piece that fits well and operates with their system.
But what you don’t know about open source contributions, it’s that fixing bugs and errors for some products is much more available rather than creating new features. but when it comes to sharing your experience for exposure, what matters is your wording and documentation for what you did, that’s what turns heads.
