F.Y.P

I’m dedicating this entire entry to my FYP. And I’m not going to care that no one’s probably going to understand what I’m saying, I’ve had enough of the shit.

Ok where should I start? All the way from the beginning I guess. When I first bade for my FYP, I thought that it would be a process of learning how it is like to work in the engineering field, under the guidance of my supervisor. I thought it would be kind of fun doing a bit of research and hands-on work and familiarizing myself with new concepts. I thought it would be a fruitful experience working with professionals in the engineering field, ranging from masters degree holders to PHD holders.

I thought wrong.

First of all, how “fun” your FYP is depends a lot on your supervisor/professor. Note that these professors indulge in their own research and have practically no time for you. In fact, taking FYP students is just part of their job requirements which entitles them to the research funds provided by the university. Hence they just set you a final destination and you pretty much have to figure out how to get there.

For my case, my FYP didn’t really start until November last year. From August till then we were just assigned background readings to get to know more on what our projects are about. As a result I had very little things to present to my examiner for CA2 (which was in late November). Well I did try to explain that we were only doing readings for the first 3 months, but I doubt my examiner understands my plight.

And hence I decided that all the way to my CA4 I’m definitely going to produce some results to “impress” my examiner. Majority of my friends know that I made frequent trips back to NUS during the December holidays just to try out the experiments. There was not much help I could get from the people in the lab, but luckily I was sort of paired with another FYP student to work on the same thing so we managed to figure something out.

That brings me to my supervisor. Basically he’s a very theoretical person. In his opinion if something works in theory, then it MUST work in practice! It’s amazing how everything seemed so simple to him. Every time we faced problems and discussed with him, he would come up with his “theoretical solutions”. To exaggerate a little, imagine asking him a question on how to send a man to the moon. His response would probably be “oh just build him a rocket and fly him there! I’m not an expert in this field but since someone has done it before surely it can be done! It must be simple!”

Yeah right.

OF COURSE it can be done, but have it ever crossed your mind that we are only FYP students!? Even you, the PROFESSOR, have no knowledge about the things that you are suggesting to us and you expect us to be able to accomplish it?? For my case we were supposed to do some imaging using LabVIEW software (and yes my prof has NO KNOWLEDGE about LabVIEW, he even said its something similar to C language). With no one to turn to (no one else in the lab knows anything about LabVIEW as well), we struggled to finally get a very rough program out. Then, by a stroke of pure luck, a LabvIEW expert was attached to our prof for a week (no its not specifically to help us) and we managed to get him to solve the majority of our programming problems.

So finally we’re seeing a bit of light, but no matter how we tried we could not manage to get the results desired. The prof, being who he is, kept suggesting new ways to test out the system, and being the students, we can only diligently follow his suggestions no matter how impossible it seemed.

I dunno about the other Departments, but in electrical engineering there’s always plenty of room for errors. Whenever you construct a circuit on the breadboard, there’s dozens of connections. Imagine having several of these circuits, there’ll be hundreds of connections. All it takes is for ONE connection to be wrong or loose and the whole system cannot function. In worse cases, you get a short circuit and burn a chip, and have to painstakingly test the chips ONE BY ONE to find out which one burnt. Even if all parts are working fine, there’s such a thing called “noise”, which are stray signals in the surroundings and breadboard that would render your measurements inaccurate.

We tried running the same setup for weeks, and every single time there’s something that went wrong. Loose connections, short circuits, chip burnt, wrong connections, PMT not working, Scan coils burnt, etc. You name it, we have it. And that’s not the worst.

Last week we tried using my prof’s new suggestion to achieve the desired results, under the supervision and aid of this lab engineer. To our delight we FINALLY managed to get some positive results, though not the exact ones we anticipated. Initially we had some doubts to the images we captured, but the lab engineer ensured us that it was an image and the result is looking positive. Screw him.

Turns out that the results, after unanimous agreements from other personnel in the lab, was just NOISE. Seriously I was fucking pissed off. I mean, we are only students, and we look onto the more experienced and more knowledgeable for confirmation of results. And the bloody lab engineer had the cheek to try to justify to us a wrong result!? WAT THE FUCK. The more I think of it the more pissed I am, cos basically we came to realize that this lab engineer is just simply trying to patronize us! Just plain lazy to help us continue striving for the desired results! KNN.

So the cycle repeats itself again. Today we tested another new suggestion (after the failure of the previous one) and the PMT does not seem to be functioning properly. And even this PHD student, someone who’s been using the PMT to carry out experiments for the past few years, could not identify this problem. It seemed the most basic usage of the PMT and yet no one would tell us why its not working properly. Added to which the scan coils burnt again due to some malfunctioning of the breadboard circuit.

That was the breaking point.

With 7 days left to the submission of our theses, there was nothing much we can really do anymore. Both of us gave up the idea of trying to rectify the circuitry course we knew there were simply too many factors that could go wrong. So we went to see our prof again.

And this time he suggested using DC stepper motors to simulate the results. First of all, to use a stepper motor we need a stepper motor board, which is like a chip PROGRAMMED to control the motors (of cos we can make out a working one from scratch in less than 7 days! Wow!). In case you’re wondering, such motors are used in the manufacturing of PRINTERS. Hello, do I look like I’m from EPSON engineering department?? Secondly, it has now become a MECHANICAL engineering project. Eh prof, please wake up, there’s NO WAY 2 FYP students are gonna come up with such a professional system and get it to work in 7 days. Oh, and I almost forgot that YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO MAKE THE SYSTEM AS WELL.


FYP = Final Year Project?

FYP = Fuck You Prof.

I've had enough of this shit. Get it over with already.