Final Major Project.
I have seen those three words bring dread and fear to the eyes of students and lecturers alike on many occasions. It seems to me that the keys to success, and the traits that always seem to appear in the best student work that I see, are threefold:
- Pick a topic that really interests you – this project will be lot of work, so getting bored and fed up with it is going to turn things into a slog towards the end.
- Plan ahead – leaving things until the last minute may be possible (if not advisable) with a smaller piece of coursework, but a project of this size is far more achievable if broken down into smaller goals, each with its own completion date. Plans can change and be modified over the course of a project, but just winging it seldom leads to reliable results or readiness dates.
- Talk to your tutor – it seems obvious, but asking the person who is going to end up marking your work as the project progresses is an easy way to keep things on track and make sure that you do not get bogged down in unneccesasary side-detail. Many students seem unwilling to share their work until it is completed, but this can only be counter-productive.
To address the first point, I have chosen a topic that greatly interests me, and a way of exploring this topic which fits with my desire to solve problems. I will be reviving a project which I began a couple of years back, and refining some designs and prototypes to construct a Eurorack compatible synthesiser module. Specifically, I am intending to build a Euclidean Sequencer, capable of sending control voltage data to further modules which I intend to build in the future, but which will likely be outside the scope of this particular project.
The deadline for this is the 18th of August, and I therefore have quite some time to get this done. Rather than outlining an entire plan at the outset, I intend to start off by spending a couple of weeks recollecting my thoughts on the project, recording them in daily posts on this blog, and then talking to my tutor about a plan and timeline for the rest of the project around the 18th of June (after a week out doing a training course at Avolites HQ). The next ten or so posts here will therefore be a walkthrough of where I sat with this project when I left it two years ago, and I will then discuss and decide how to move forwards and what I aim to achieve with the project.
