Things project supervisors doesn’t like to see in your project file
Tags: Project, Research Project, Project Supervisor, Undergraduate Project

Due to the rigorous nature of undergraduate projects, supervisors or your research advisor will, by default, not allow some things to go wrong in your project under their watch. What you must understand is that while they are guiding and putting you through the research procedures, they also are guiding their academic reputation by making sure to produce the best of project students. Caught in this web, there things your project supervisor will not like to see in your project file while still researching.

As convention demands, I don’t know about other climes, but over here in Nigeria, I suppose the chapters of the project are approved in a sequential order. In this case, chapter one is approved first, followed by chapter two and so it will graduate to chapter five. So before an approval is made at each chapter, it would have gone through rigorous scrutiny and corrections. Those mistakes that necessitate the scrutiny are what your supervisor won’t like to see. Let’s get to know what they are and what to do about it.

Lack of historical background

In research, it is believed that every study is traceable to a background history. So in your project chapter one, the introductory page should atleast contain a comprehensive background history of where your research has inspired and what direction of solution you are trying to posit via your research.

Copy and paste

Nobody says you should conduct an academic research without checking out related researches done by scholars. But the campaign against plagiarism is very simple — simply acknowledge every single word, phrase, sentence, paragraph or page you may have adopted in part or in full from another author.

Your project supervisor will not stand a glance at an obvious copied piece of text on your undergraduate project file without acknowledgement, that is plagiarism — academic theft and punishable offence at that.

Lack of coherence

For every hypothesis or critical claim you posit in your research project, there must be a supporting commentary, analysis and critique as against opposing opinions. However these commentary must fall in line with the claim but where it lacks coherence, your project supervisor will not like it. He will rather be forced to question your source of ideology or maybe consider your write-up juvenile in nature.

Negligence to corrections

Any act of negligence is the last thing your project supervisor will tolerate because that is why he is a supervisor- to guide you against mistakes. So you don’t have to neglect corrections.

Remarks are usually make in red in and when you see that, please take note and effect the corrections immediately. Reason is, the corrections have to be gotten write before you proceed for the next chapter. Won’t you rather, take correction early so you can proceed and finish up in time.

My regret

In respect to the last point about corrections, some project supervisors are not nice at all. Sometimes it is easier for them to cross out an entire cool page just because of a wrong line or phrase than to simply mark out the actual mistake.

If you are find yourself under the watch of such supervisor, kindly take it back to ascertain the actual mistake . Else, you can sleep in that page and he really wouldn’t care.

CTA

If wishes were horses, projects wouldn’t be compulsory for every undergraduate. But where you really can’t help it, you have to follow religiously the procedures required. It is assumed your supervisor knows better, play cool through out and make the research process quick and easy.