The Dissertation/FYP thread 2008

Submitted mine on Tuesday! :D

So nice to have it out the way now, been enjoying just sitting around doing nothing (without feeling guilty about it).
 
I found my dissertation and project write up from 2006 the other day. Started reading through it and could hardly follow what I was talking about. I've lost a few brain cells I think!!!
best (and scariest) feeling was printing it all out and handing it in to be bound...DONT DESTROY MY MASTERPIECE!
 
Pickers said:
I found my dissertation and project write up from 2006 the other day. Started reading through it and could hardly follow what I was talking about. I've lost a few brain cells I think!!!
best (and scariest) feeling was printing it all out and handing it in to be bound...DONT DESTROY MY MASTERPIECE!
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lol, know that feeling :D
 
Staples can bind things for you, they all have a print/copy counter where you can get stuff bound. Not sure how much it is though..

p.s. nitefly, your project sounds rly complicated but amazing nonetheless, thanks for trying to explain it! :)
how come it takes 6 months for results to come through, thats ages!
 
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Handed mine in last Monday and have just been taking it easy now - first exam isn't until the 7th May!

My life felt very empty once it was all done though - seeing as I'd been living and breathing dissertation the last few months !!
 
Gaygle said:
Oh god. I'm actually ****ting myself now looking at some of these titles. So far in my 2nd year i've had a couple of essays that don't have to be longer than about 2000 words - but i don't know how i'll EVER write about 10000 words on something.

Especially something like the "SYNTHESIS OF NOVEL PROSTAGLANDIN F2-ALPHA IN TRANSFORMED SACCHAROMYCES CEREVISIAE AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN EXPRESSION CASSETTE FOR PLANT TRANSFORMATION" featured earlier on in the thread

I mean....where do you even BEGIN to start researching something like that? Is that a degree dissertation or a PhD one?
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Don't worry too much about it. Im in my second year too and up til about a month ago I was bricking it telling myself I could never be THAT interested in anything to write 10k! This holiday I've had two 5000 word essays to write tho and now theyre done, they didn't really seem that long at all.

You just need to find something you like and find interesting that isn't too obscure and you'll soon find that once you start reading the words really mount up.
 
Yea, it's amazing how much you can write when you put yourself to it. Even doing 4k words in a day isn't difficult, if you're focused and in the mood for it :) .....speaking from experience, having done similar sized articles in the same period of time :D
 
Our department did the binding for us, although we could also go and get it done at the uni's reprographics unit or wherever we wanted so long as it was to the right style.

Cost I think £7.50 to do my printing and then the two bound copies were £4 to do so not that bad all in all :)
 
electric ant said:
p.s. nitefly, your project sounds rly complicated but amazing nonetheless, thanks for trying to explain it! :)
how come it takes 6 months for results to come through, thats ages!
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Thank you, and you are most welcome!

Once plants cells have been transformed (Agrobacterium) then plants need to fully grow and breed to isolate homozygous mutants (what we are looking for). Obviously, breeding plants takes awhile! Plant transformation is not always a guarenteed success. Infact, it is suprising when you get to that level of science that things don't work 'just because'. You just have to accept that sometimes things don't work.

One of the PHD students in the lab was trying to transform E. coli with a plasmid she made... she was trying for her 6th week in a row (each friday the results were negative). When I said 'isn't that frustrating?' she replied 'are you kidding? It took 6 months last time!'.

Hence why I'm going to do law instead :p

Lashout_UK said:
Yea, it's amazing how much you can write when you put yourself to it. Even doing 4k words in a day isn't difficult, if you're focused and in the mood for it :) .....speaking from experience, having done similar sized articles in the same period of time :D
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Not to sound patronising, but surely that would be 4000 words of complete crap? I absolutely slaved over rewriting mine approximately 10 times before handing it in. Plus the research and referencing needed takes an absolute age before you even get to writing anything down.

My project, for the record, was 5,800 words (written in the style of a journal) and cost £9 to get it printed in high quality colour and bound.
 
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I used to struggle to get 500 words done a day, I used to labor over every sentence, checking citations, references reinterpreting and rewording. No way in hell I could have got out any more than say 750 words in one day without having made a rubbish job.

Then last year on my PGCE I managed to up my game and bash out 700 - 1000 words a day, but then that was all waffle and my own opinions anyway which I wasn't so concerned about "getting right"
 
Had 2 copies of mine bound on Thursday. £8.50 and it looks pretty smart :)

During the periods I spent hammering my project, I set myself a target of 500 words a day to make myself feel like the day had been worthwhile, anymore was a bonus. Ended up with 35000 words (20k report + 15k appendices).

Interesting point about the PGCE above though, i'll be starting a PGCE in September, whats your opinion of the work load compared to a final year of a degree?
 
Going to Cali said:
It's the reasoning and justification i guess. In mine, I decided to use mysql to hold the 600,000 records but to me this seems like a given.
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Why chose mysql over say oracle, sqlite, ms-sql etc? Why a relational database not one based on a hiarachical model or network model?

Going to Cali said:
Also using hashmaps to hold the objects generated from the database in local memory so if I need to retrieve them it's easy and fast, again seems like a given to me :-/
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Why a hashmap instead of a treemap? Etc.. etc.. It's about justifying your design choices. Nothing is a given.
 
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