Undergraduate projects are one of the last and unavoidable core curriculum activities that students must take before being certified full-flagged graduates in any Nigeria University, ohw ! It’s even a universal practice anyway. So, the research comes with a couple and more natural challenges and some too which are man-made (certainly the fault of the project students themselves, their supervisor and their associates).

In the course of their research projects, undergraduate tend to meet with a lot of people, go to places, and negotiate with people; that’s the same way the fleet of challenges extends from internal to external.

I have to put you through the challenges associated with undergraduate projects as we progress but first, here are common and regular sources of those challenges, it will help give a clue of where we are going.

Common and regular sources of undergraduate projects challenges

• Generalization
• Data sources
• Choice of project topics
• Project supervisors
• Time management


These are not all that there is, already people will discuss theirs individually based on the nature of their research, the project topics they chose, financial factors and all that. Let’s link up these sources and the factors for the challenges. So we have;

Challenges associated with undergraduate projects

Inaccurate generalization
It’s almost not safe to generalize the research outcome of undergraduate researches. Reason is this; the sample size of a typical undergraduate project is weigh too small to precisely speak for an entire research population; and that constitutes a big challenge since we can’t comfortably make a generalization from such research.

Data sources
Especially while dealing with humans as data sources, chances are that they will give not-so-true data as they may consider those data too personal, private ad may eve even think they are doing you a favor by filling up the empty spaces with whatever they are sure isn’t true.

Your project topic variables could be wrong
This is one of the man-made challenges I had talked about earlier, the first two are natural. Some project topics are wrongly structured with the wrong variables. You may not realize until it’s time to interpret who your research population and sizes are. That has always been a challenge most of the time with researches that has to do with survey.

Project supervisors; your choice hardly matter
Many times students choices hardly matter when it comes to choosing a project supervisor. While the institution have their reasons, there choice may not be what students need to get their research done on time. Sorry to say, Some supervisors are lazy readers, some poor time keepers, some are talented in ruling out your mistakes and never make attempt to point out where their mistake lies.

If students were left to choose, some lecturers or instructors will be left with no student researcher to mind, trust me.

Poor time management
It really doesn’t matter if your supervisor delayed your research or you, the fact is, you will get to bear the blame if you couldn’t round up your research in time.

To beat that, I suppose you need to start up your research in time and if your supervisor is pulling so much delay, I suggest you apply for a new research supervisor.

Challenges are not totally avoidable in research especially such that comes along naturally. But you could manage them so it doesn’t get so obvious that it invalidates your research.

Moreover, undergraduate’s projects are more like a mock-project where student execute a kind of do –it-yourself thing. Students get to crack all there is to a research, project execution and exhibition even though it has little or no influence on a larger population.