Planning a final year project at an Irish university

Short answer first: a final year project is usually the biggest single module you will take. Trinity reserves 20 ECTS for the capstone and its final year computing project is worth exactly that, University of Galway's biochemistry research project BI453 is 15 ECTS, and 20 out of 60 credits means a third of your final year sits in one piece of work. Word counts are set by your school, not the university: DCU's School of Communications asks for 10,000 to 12,000 words in an undergraduate thesis. The work starts in September, not in March.

This is about the shape of the thing: what it is worth, who does what, what has to be approved before you start, and where the months go. Your own handbook has the details, and it will contradict parts of this. Follow the handbook.

What is the project worth, and how much time does that buy?

The credit figure is the most useful number you have, because it tells you how many hours the project was designed to take. Trinity's regulations limit undergraduate modules to 5 and 10 ECTS, with 20 reserved for the capstone module only, and put one credit at 20 to 25 hours of estimated student input. The rest of how Irish assessment is built is covered in how Irish university exams actually work.

• Trinity's capstone is 20 ECTS. A third of the 60 credit year, and at 20 to 25 hours a credit that is 400 to 500 hours.
• Trinity's final year computing project CSU44099 is 20 ECTS and runs across both semesters, with an interim report in semester one and the project report near the end of semester two.
• University of Galway's biochemistry research project is 15 ECTS. BI453 runs over eight weeks and forms the basis of the final year thesis.

Four hundred hours over the two semesters is roughly twelve hours a week from the end of September. Almost nobody works that way. What happens instead is that the first months go on other modules, and the hours reappear compressed into six weeks in the spring, on top of coursework and revision. The credit figure is a warning about that, written down in advance.

How long does it have to be?

Ask your school, not the internet, because the range across Irish schools is enormous and the university itself often sets nothing.

• DCU's School of Communications sets 10,000 to 12,000 words for an undergraduate thesis, 12,000 to 20,000 at postgraduate level, and 3,000 to 6,000 for a project report. It recommends the Harvard system and asks for page numbers whenever you quote.
• National College of Ireland publishes 6,000 to 8,000 words for the psychology final year project.
• University of Galway's maths school counts pages rather than words: 20 to 30 pages for undergraduates, 35 at the most, excluding front matter and appendices, with the report worth 90 percent and the presentation 10 percent.

The gap between 6,000 words and 12,000 words is not a detail. It decides how many studies you read, how many interviews you run, and whether your method section is two pages or eight. Get the number in September and write it at the top of your plan.

What does your supervisor actually do?

A supervisor advises. They will help you turn a vague interest into a question that can be answered, tell you when a method will not survive contact with your data, point you at the literature you have missed, and read a draft. That is a lot.

What they do not do is run the project. Trinity's computing project page says students and supervisors meet on a regular basis throughout the two semesters without setting a number. DCU's thesis guidelines say that once supervisors are assigned you should arrange to consult them as necessary. Galway's maths school puts the first move on the student too: you approach potential supervisors to discuss topics. Every one of those sentences quietly makes the meetings your job.

The first meeting

Go in with three things written down and you will leave with a project instead of a feeling.

1. Two or three possible questions, each one sentence long, and which you prefer.
2. What you would have to collect or build to answer each one.
3. The dates your school has set for the proposal, the interim report and the submission.

Then ask four questions: is this answerable in the time, what would you read first, does this need ethics approval, and how often should we meet. Write down the answers in the same document. That document becomes your record of what was agreed, which matters in March when your memory of November is optimistic.

A meeting every two or three weeks with a page of new writing attached beats an hour of conversation with nothing to look at. Send the page the day before. Supervisors read; they rarely improvise.

Do you need ethics approval before you talk to anyone?

If your project involves people as participants, the answer is almost always yes, and the approval has to come before you collect anything.

DCU is clear about both halves. Undergraduate and taught masters research projects are reviewed at local School level, and students should liaise with their supervisors about it. And research should not begin until the approval letter arrives from the committee. Trinity builds the same requirement into the project itself: the interim report for the final year computing project includes an ethical review alongside the project description, work plan and literature review.

What that means in practice:

• Ask in the first fortnight which committee covers your school and when it meets.
• Build in the waiting time. A committee that meets monthly can push a February application into March, and revisions add another round.
• Approval is for the study you described. Change the population, the questions or the recording method and you may need to go back.
• Interviews and recordings are personal data. How consent, storage and access work under Irish and EU rules is set out in what GDPR means for Irish students.

If the timeline is tight, ask your supervisor whether the question can be answered from existing data, published datasets or documents. Reframing a project in October is cheap. Waiting for a committee in March is not.

How do you keep a reading log you can cite from?

The week most students lose is not the writing week. It is the week in April spent finding again the paper that said the thing, because in October they read it, thought "I will remember that", and did not.

What the log needs in it

One row per source, filled in the day you read it:

• The full reference in the style your school asks for. DCU's School of Communications recommends Harvard; other schools differ, so check yours.
• The page number for anything you might quote or paraphrase. DCU asks for page numbers when quoting, and a paraphrase you cannot locate is a paraphrase you cannot defend.
• One sentence in your own words saying what the source argues.
• One sentence saying why it matters to your question, or that it does not.
• A tag for the section it belongs to: method, background, the thing you disagree with.

A spreadsheet is fine. A reference manager is better if you already use one, and September is the month to learn it, not April. The habit matters more than the tool: nothing goes into the log that you have not read, and nothing you have read stays out of it.

The second sentence, the one in your own words, is doing more work than it looks. It is active recall applied to reading, and it is also the first draft of your literature section. Twenty sources logged this way in the autumn is most of a chapter by Christmas.

When should each piece of the project be done?

Fill this in against your own school's dates. The shape holds even when the months shift.

Two things about that table. The interim deadline in December is doing you a favour, because it forces the reading and the method to exist before the exams. And the full draft goes to the supervisor with real time left, because a draft handed over three days before the deadline gets sympathy, not feedback.

If your project needs equipment, lab access, participants or a permission from outside the university, work backwards from the month you need it and add a fortnight. Access is where project timelines break, and it breaks quietly.

What do you do when it stalls?

Every project stalls. The difference between a stalled project and a failed one is how long you sit in it alone.

The stall you can fix in an afternoon

Most stalls are one of four things, and three of them are small:

• The question is too big. You cannot see where to start because there is no start. Cut it down until it is almost embarrassingly narrow, then check with your supervisor. Narrow questions get better marks than broad ones.
• You are waiting for something. Data, access, a reply, approval. Write the sections that do not depend on it. Method, background and the introduction can all be drafted while you wait.
• You do not want to show anyone a bad draft. Send it anyway, labelled as rough. A supervisor reading a bad draft in February is the entire point of having a supervisor.
• The method is not working. This is the real one. Say so in the next meeting rather than the one after. There is usually a smaller version of the study that still answers something.

Book the meeting before you have fixed it. Students often postpone supervision until they have something good to report, which means supervision stops exactly when it would help most.

Two habits keep the wheels turning. Work on the project on the same days every week, even for ninety minutes, so it is not competing with coursework for attention it will always lose. And keep a running document of decisions, so the version of you that sits down in March knows why the February version chose that sample. If you tend to freeze when a deadline gets close rather than drift, exam anxiety covers the same machinery.

What happens when you submit it?

Your work goes through the university's text matching system, and it is worth knowing what that system actually does: University of Galway tells students plainly that Turnitin does not check assignments for plagiarism and that the similarity score only measures how far your text matches other documents, so correctly cited material is not misconduct.

After that, the rest of the submission is logistics, and logistics is where marks go missing for no reason. Leave a full day for it. Check the file format and the file name your school asks for. Check that every citation in the text appears in the reference list and the other way around. Check the word count against the range in your handbook. Print it if printing is required, because printers fail on the day they are needed.

Where Notibo fits

A project is built on two piles: what you read, and what you were told. The reading is yours to log. The telling is the part that leaks, because supervision meetings, methods classes and lab briefings are where the specific instruction lives, and nobody takes clean notes while they are being corrected.

Notibo records a meeting or a lecture, or takes an audio file you upload, and returns a transcript, structured notes and flashcards, so what your supervisor actually said in November is still readable in March. It transcribes 89 languages, and it turns PDF, PPTX and DOCX files into notes and flashcards, which is the more useful half for a literature review. Pro is free for the first 14 days, with 240 minutes of recording and no card. After the trial the free plan covers 30 minutes of recording a month, and Pro is 9.99 euro a month. Uploads are capped at 50 MB per file. Ask your supervisor before you record them, the same way you would ask a lecturer. Files are stored in the EU on Supabase in Frankfurt, while transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses, so check what your ethics approval says about where interview audio may go before you upload any of it. Pricing is here if you want the plan details.