Twelve ways of making your FYP supervisor happy

Remember, happy supervisors generally also mean good grades.

1. The evening before a presentation is not the time to start working on it.
2. Neither can you write a coherent thesis in one night.
3. If you absolutely have to use Excel, at least learn how to scale and reformat your axes, and how to get rid of that grey background . What Excel thinks is the best scale may not be the best one for conveying the significance of your data.
4. Images from scientific instruments (AFM, SEM, whatever) are often high resolution, which means big file sizes. Compress, cut or use lower resolution images for your reports and presentations! Even though we have PhDs, our paychecks aren’t that high, so we have old pokey computers that will choke on your 50 Mbyte ppts/docs. Assuming we manage to get the files through our low-speed connection in the first place.
5. If you cite Wikipedia as a source, we will automatically fail you.
6. If you copy stuff from Wikipedia, we will make you eat your thesis. Without ketchup or chilli.
7. You do not have to report EVERY successful experiment that you did. We will fall asleep after seeing an optical lithography dose test for the 100th time.
8. Similarly, you do not have to report EVERY failed experiment that you did. Really, we don’t care to hear how you dropped your sample face down onto the dirty carpet, and how efforts to remove the fluff led to your sample looking like a badly scratched cat toy.
9. In the same vein, please please please do not put all 200+ pages of code in your presentation slides. Nothing turns your audience off more than seeing “Slide 1 of 256″ at the corner of the screen. We’re not going to type in your code to check that it works, neither are we going to read it to find out what exactly your program is intended to do.
10. Your presentation is not an opportunity to show off your Powerpoint WordArt or animation skills. Not only are they distracting, but we would be wondering what you’re trying to hide behind all that flashiness.
11. End your presentation on a slide listing all your conclusions, so that your examiners can ponder over them. We are not impressed by fancy “Thank You” or “Q&A” slides, or slides with pictures of yourself posing in the lab.
12. Practice your oral presentation. Then practice it again. And again. If there are any words you can’t pronounce or spell, ASK! It is hard for us to suppress our laughter when you measure lengths in Armstrongs, or magnetic field strengths in Oysters.