Tips for the honours project

I happened to be talking to a friend who's just about to start an
honours project in engineering down in Canberra, and during the conversation
I came up with two pieces of advice that I would give honours project
students based on my experience. I thought they would be useful to pass on
to the research methods students. I'm pretty sure you actually mentioned
similar things in research methods when I went through, but I guess you have
to go through it yourself to really appreciate it.

1. Make the project modular. I'm sure you told me this, and you were
definitely right. In my project, there were a number of goals I set out to
achieve, and when some of them (ie demonstrating plausibility of the stretch
receptor model) were successful, I was able to focus on them and drop some
peripheral back-up goals (ie those related to CPG modelling).

2. Get as much research done as you can in the first semester. In
retrospect, I think this is the only reason my project really got anywhere.
Looking back at the research methods deliverables, most of the software had
already been written and most of the preliminary studies before the end of
semester. That left only finishing up the software and doing the final
simulations in the second semester, leaving most of the time for writing up.
Writing up did actually take almost a whole semester (it's easy to not
realise this when starting), so you really don't want to be doing the main
research work then. I really can't stress this enough: get the research done
early! Please tell them this from me.

Hope this helps,
Mark