Final-year project work for technical courses takes a tumble

Pune: The pandemic has forced students to study as many theory subjects as possible on their own with the least help from teachers, but when it comes to final-year working projects which students of engineering, architecture and other courses have to mandatorily make, the year has been brutal.
Aniruddha Joshi, a final-year engineering student, said two of his team members live in Akola while the other two live in Pune.“We divided our work. They did most of the analytics and simulation part while we are doing the experimental part. The problem is that we have to buy everything from scratch. In the laboratories, we have all the basic infrastructure available, but at home, we need to buy everything right from the soldering gun. With the electrical shops closed, we have to order everything online and it is also costlier.”
Students who were interning with various companies were unable to utilise their opportunities because the lockdown restricted many companies to call only 50% of their staff at a time, leading to lesser priority given for mentoring the interns.
Mausam Dhande, a final-year production engineering student, said that in his internship, he could only complete the research based part of his project as the lockdown set him back to working in a virtual mode. “We had to adapt ourselves to the virtual part of it. We generally have to research a project and then come up with an innovative solution for the company to apply, but this time, that could not be done because of the lockdown,” he added.
Manohar Chaskar, dean of science and technology faculty at SPPU, said, “There are some master’s level (PG) courses wherein project work is essential and important. Due to the lockdown, these students could not go to the college and hence a lot of their work is pending. Hence, we decided that these final year master’s level students in pharmacy, engineering and architecture, can submit their projects and appear for viva latest by August 31 instead of June-end. This is only applicable for master’s level students and not for undergraduates.”
Practical Difficulties
Students are divided into groups and the projects are made after spending almost a year in the laboratory
Lockdown has ensured that none of them could meet often let alone use the college laboratory for making the live projects
Many groups, including those from civil engineering and mechanical engineering, have taken to software-based projects
These can be completed without having to step out of their homes
Recently, Savitribai Phule Pune University announced a three-month extension for the project work
It is for postgraduate students in engineering, architecture and other technical courses