Friday, February 15, 2008

My Final Year Project

The start of the 7th semester, we all had just one thing roaming about in all the rooms of our brains. Final Year Project aka FYP. This is all we thought about the entire day. The first question we would ask others would be "Did you get FYP?". Mostly followed by "Have you made a group yet" and then "What are you guys planning to make?".
We would stay in the university till 4:30, discussing ideas, trying to get some good ones, searching over the net, talking to people, discussing with our teachers.
It seemed like every idea we came up with got rejected. No, it didn't seem like it, it was what really was happening.
It seemed like we spent the most part of our day, going to the ground floor, and discuss one idea with a teacher, asking for his ideas, and he really gave us some excellent ones, and then going to other teachers to get them approved. So most of the day was spent in travelling from the first floor to the ground and then going up again, from one corridor to the next, from one corner to the other.
After browsing through many ideas, we got one that we thought would be accepted by the committee. We didn't have many doubts about it being accepted. What we were worried about was us being able to develop it. But everything doesn't go the way you expect it to go, does it?
And so was the fate of this little, harmless expectation of ours. Our idea was brutally rejected by the committee.
And we are back to square one, again.
The prospect of going through the same ordeal of searching, analyzing (we never really did this part), discussing and getting the approval horrified us. The fact that not much project ideas have been rejected didn't do any good to improve our depressed situation.
We again started going to teachers for ideas, also trying to know why our first idea was rejected and seeing if we could do anything to change the rejected status to the one favorite status of "Accepted".
Couldn't do anything about the first idea, but one of our teacher again presented us with ideas he had already given and the ones we failed to understand.
We were now left with no option then to pick up any of those ideas.
We had realized by then that we can't up with any good ideas, so we should better accept the reality, and try to get our interests in one of the proposed ideas.
We liked both the ideas he gave, but we chose the one that had to do with blogs.
Thus, I am here writing a blog about my project that is based on blogs.
If it wasn't for my project, I don't think I ever would have started blogging. But now when I have started blogging, I am liking it.
A shameful confession:
I didn't know a thing about blogs till this project.

So we started a project that was a data mining project. Basically, blog mining.
But our supervisor, the teacher who gave us the idea of this project, wanted us to not to name the project as "Blog Miner".
He wanted to come up with a different name, he said and I quote:
"Tum loog naam soch rahay ho ya mein apni ammi se pochoon......... unhein buhat shauq hai naam rakhnay ka"

And so we named it "Blog Digger".

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