Now, an FYP is an absolute crapshoot. You know all those horror stories your seniors told you about it? They were being merciful, bless their souls, because what they said was simply the tip of the iceberg. Some things, words will not suffice. In fact, nothing in the known world can express it. It is like a black hole that sucks in your time and energy, giving you nothing but an inky blackness in return, so that when you look at it, you can't help but wonder where all that effort went.
Somehow the teachers have also figured that FYPs are best done with other school commitments as well, their reasoning being that you have a whole year to do it. Or actually, just eight months. But here's the thing. Do you realise most of them have never done an FYP? Ah-ha! They can't possibly even know what it really entails.
At the end of it, if you're lucky, it will be the best thing you did all four years, the magnum opus of your training at WKWSCI. An illustrated feature story, a film that challenges you to think, or a successful event. You will be one of those smiling people wearing their convocation robes in polaroids, where the robes simply obscure the fact that really, "nobody knows the trouble I've seen."
Or, it could be just shit, so that you'd rather forget it ever happened. Or mindnumbingly average, destined to be consigned into the dark depths somewhere in the annals of the ACRC, to be unearthed by an archaeological team someday like the Italians did with Pompeii of Mount Vesuvius. The only difference is, even then they might decide that your report is better used as firewood.
"Yo Monty, check this out. It's a school report."
(flips through contents)
"On the other hand, let's just pretend we didn't see it."
It starts out normally like any other school project, and then it morphs into something else entirely. Beginning as an amorphous blob, it soon grows arms and legs in all directions and before you know it, it is a thirty foot monster with a hundred arms and even more legs. Heck, it even grows manparts and ladyparts, so it can constantly reproduce itself.
And the worst thing about the FYP is really how it just hangs around, like a case of someone farting in the lift. Even after the offending source is gone, a toxic cloud of it lingers, getting caught up in the air circulation.
The FYP. As pleasant as someone letting it rip. I've had friends complaining about how they live, breathe and dream about it. But you know, breathing in bad air has a tendency to affect your general wellbeing, so you start becoming irritable and highly strung. You become one of those people that always go "Don't talk to me about FYP!" and five minutes later, voila, you bring it up again, because you can't help it. It has a vicegrip on your mind, your life, and everything in between.
And you know how they always say that shit happens? Well, in FYPs, shit is the building block, it is literally the foundation of all FYPs. Shit doesn't just happen, you can be sure that at every step of the way you will be overwhelmed by it. And when you take a microscope and zoom into each block, you can be sure that each block of shit is really composed of granules of even more... you guessed it - shit.
A lot of it comes from being a student and being expected to produce a work of professional quality. Most of the time, people don't even give you a chance, simply because you are a student. You had no problems at all in internship producing the work, because people trusted your organisation. As a student, you can be the very same person, but people just don't trust you so it is hard to get anything done without being exploited or conveniently ignored.
And it is often the things that you think are going fine that end up becoming the shittiest. After all, nothing screws up your day more than thinking you settled something, only to have a call come in just five minutes before H-Hour telling you that the roof is on fire, the firemen are all drunk in some strip club somewhere, and a dog just chewed on all the fire hoses so they all leak. If I were an employer, I would hire the fixers in FYP groups, simply because they tend to be the most adept problem solvers.
It is like wearing fur boots into a cow pasture, experiencing the kind of feeling you get from watching it stick onto the boots and getting entangled in the millions of minuscule fibres, over and over, knowing that you will never get it off in this life. The shit that happens doesn't just happen, it stays with you, gnawing away at your sanity. Soon you will be chewing bark and pontificating to random people, if it doesn't kill you first.
I think the best measure of just how shitty an FYP really is would be this. If you were to put a gun to me and say "Your life, or you do FYP", I'd take the gun and do the shooting myself.