I haven’t felt this anxious for a while, its my last semester and in a week I should have a BS in electrical engineering.

Just finished up a 50 page paper on my senior design project. We thought it was over and done with, but our advisor still wants a presentation. The problem is that there is nothing to show for it because one of our components apperently failed (we don’t know if thats the part that failed, we can’t isolate the problem because the whole system is acting funky even though we did tons of testing on each component to make sure it worked) and we didn’t know how to fix it.

We can show that the other parts work but we would have to recode the whole thing because those components all fed back into the part that failed so there is nothing to physically see even though they do what they are supposed to do. He wants to see a demo on Monday, but this weekend was meant to study for the other finals and do other projects. The amount of work I have to do in the next 5 days is so overwhelming, I’m so anxious I don’t even know where to start right now. I needed good grades this semester to maintain a decent GPA to apply for jobs (which is making me anxious too, I totally procrastinated the whole thing and I’m not gonna have health insurance soon either). I also don’t want this professor to think me and my team mates are complete fuckups who didn’t do anything the whole semester and just came up with a bullshit excuse for not having a working project.

Fuck I need sleep but dont have the time for it.

I feel your pain. Next week is going to suck for me, granted I only have 4 finals. One of them is a practical final for my clinical rotation. Last semester they were so dirty about it and pulled out shit we don’t even use EVER!! Needless to say just thinking about that on top of thinking about how I haven’t even started studying yet is really making me anxious. Doesn’t really help that 2 weeks after my finals summer session starts, blah.

I don’t know WHAT possessed me to think I needed a graduate degree

Good luck on your finals and your presentation!! I would honestly someone incorporate the component’s failure into the presentation. I would then also add the reason WHY you guys think it failed, as well as other possibilities. If you make it look like you put thought into researching possible reasons for failure, and gave good, strong evidence that these reasonings might pertain to your situation, I’m sure the professor will respect that and appreciate that you put the effort into it.

That’s what I would do Not sure how it works in the engineering world, but whenever I present research that didn’t go as I had planned, I always give the "here’s what went wrong… in the next trial, these parameters will be taken in to consideration… here’s how this experiment can be improved upon… blah blah blah." Works in psychology at least

Yeah that approach works well in Psychology and Behavioral Science because there’s always room to improve in experimental design. I think with Engineering it’s more of a hit or miss.

Good luck you two, almost there!

Shows you how much I know about engineering!

Good luck guys!

Me, too! Sometimes I even hope for whatever I’m experimenting with to fail, just so my discussion section of the paper is longer.

I do the exact same thing
I have all 3 of my finals on Tuesday, all in a row. Finals crew

I’m such a terrible student.

Yuck. I have 2 Monday, 1 Tuesday, and 1 Thursday.. a little spaced out, but I would deem none of them as an easy final. I’m worried about them all.
I get the feeling he just wants to see that we did put effort in there and didn’t just bullshit the project, which is hard to show as it is because there is nothing you can actually physically see in this system without that part working.

We can explain to him what the problem was and replicate it for him, but he still might think we just started a few weeks ago, ran into a problem, and gave up. In engineering the idea is that if something goes wrong, you just go back and try a different method or start from scratch.

We ran into the problem a week or two before hte project was due, which to someone who didn’t see the work that was put in before, and the work that was put in after to try correct the problem, might seem awfully convenient. I’d say a solid 80% of our time was spent making tiny adjustments to try to determine the problem, but there is very little to physically show to prove that this was done because in the end we coudln’t fix it. We are left with tons of unfinished code and small chunks of the project working but these would require a recode to actually demonstrate that they worked.

Yeah I’ll admit I’ve done it in a few classes.

Try to recall and date your progress. Like say you started at blah blah time and then at these subsequent dates you ran into this, tried that, and then this happened. From what you’ve described he sounds like an understanding prof who’s just looking for the time and effort.
i have one final on friday, one monday, and two on tuesday. i broke up with my gf of 2 years a couple weeks ago. i’ve been seeing this other girl who doesn’t want to get involved in anything serious. my friend from home just died. i think i’m losing my mind.

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