Thesis

The past two posts were about Assume and Revaluation, and this time it is thesis. After writing the first post I wish to make it a trilogy and call it Anna University trilogy (Come on its trilogy season and even I wanted to name it as Epic Conclusion). The “assume” may be the first lesson I learnt but it’s the revaluation that brought the unique style to the university and my college life. Analyzing these facts leads to the end of the college life and at the end one big hurdle that stands out to show what the meaning of hurdle is.

I am not going to talk about the mini project and the project from mechanical engineer’s point of view. For us mechanical engineers the mini project is so simple that we need to buy them some thattu muttu saamaan (some basic furniture, paying for repairing the equipment and so on) and the project is so simple, go pay and buy or do your guide’s Ph.D project. I am not sure if it’s the same with other departments. So let us leave that and go back to the thesis preparation. Although each branch has its own way of doing the project, all of our students somehow end up with generalized term of preparing the thesis.

Now this term Thesis is something which is the penultimate term in terms of the university. Thesis comes in six parts mainly, Introduction, literature survey, experimental work or whatever work and then the results and discussions finally a conclusion. Of course references are added later. Let us discuss the way each part is made by our students who gave me a path to work on it and complete the thesis comfortably.

Introduction – this is a simple and the complex portion of the report. Here we use certain key words for the project and those key words has a page in Wiki and the page is transferred, edited, hyperlinks are removed and fonts are changed accordingly and hence introduction is complete. This may look like a simple process as I said earlier, but the problem here is that we are forced to extend the pages, which is a biggest problem in filling pages with our own stories just like we do in our exams. So we need to go to the references or further reading section in Wiki and more and more of copy paste. It is complicated to fill pages which are irrelevant and make it look like the most important part of it.

Literature survey – this is the second section of the thesis that forms the vein of the report which is really a pain to the students. Getting original research papers from the various sites such Sciencedirect and springers is not possible, so we search in science direct and the abstract of the paper will be available and the alteration of the abstract is a point in the literature survey. At least the literature survey should occupy six to seven pages but can be forgiven for making it three, anything less than that is a sin. You can find a lot of interesting titles there which may even represent something that is not at all related to the student’s project.

Experimental work or the project – this is the real section where we people won’t fill the pages. Here the work we really did is explained in a discreet manner that by reading no one should understand what has been explained. As usual jargons play an important role in making the project section better. The problem with this section is that here we cannot extend the pages as our wish so in order to complete the pages we once again go back to the introduction part.

Results and Discussions and Conclusion – in this part we present them that we have a result that makes the examiner believe that we have done something and thus we conclude we done a project and you need to do give us some marks.

References – in this section we have to list the papers we have used to gain knowledge, but actually this section is the tribute to the authors who have helped us in completing the paper (Remember it is not copy, we did all the above plagiarism as a tribute to these authors and we are mentioning them too so no copyright infringement or plagiarism charges). Thus the project is finished and based on this a powerpoint presentation has to be made. The presentation helps in giving an enigmatic explanation to the examiner who at any cost not going to read our so called thesis. So within a short span of around 20 minutes we have to confuse the examiner with mere 15 slides at the same level what we did to our guide with around 60 pages. Thus the project is completed. This is only to praise the perseverance of the students of the Anna university and I am in no way offending the students who buy their project and helping various old students forming a project centre and keeping the mind cool.

Thus by posting this I am ending this Anna university series. I hope the conclusion is an epic, or you can call it Epic conclusion. Thanks to Nolan, Hangover team and so many others who helped me to give hype to the trilogy. May be after a while the series may get a reboot for another trilogy. Thanks to Nolan and Webb again.