Recently Ive been getting a lot of calls from college students inquiring about a chance to do their final year project in my company. I do a small informal interview over the phone itself to see whether they are self driven. Some are really good, but troubles begin when we get to the project selection.

Most of them have only a months time to do their project. Thats when I suggest going for a study project. Mostly I suggest learning the architecture of some well known open source project. But it seems that most of the project guides in colleges have something serious against study projects. In some colleges students are given strict instructions, and some are really funny. Ill list some of them.

• No Study projects
• No database projects
• No websites
• Only IEEE projects (what the heck is this)
• Projects related to previous years projects wont be accepted

After having read all of these rules, Im having a feeling that our engineering colleges have become MITs. With the stupid syllabus that we teach here, no normal student can write 10 lines lines of code properly.

Now coming back to study projects, they are the best suited for our engineering syllabus, cos students only get one or two months for their project. And doing something new (leave the IEEE part) itself will take two months to get started. With a study project the student can easily understand how things are done professionally, and that can greatly help his career.

Most of the open source project addresses a market demand. By doing a study project, the student gets exposure to the industry, and the hot technologies that are going to hit the market.