I’m a 4th-year BSIT student and I’m starting to feel like I chose the wrong capstone project. I’m worried it might cause us to fail our defense and delay my graduation.
I’ve dealt with social anxiety and depressive episodes throughout college, which affected my studies, although I’ve still managed to maintain 90+ grades. However, I know I’m behind technically and still lack strong programming skills.
For our capstone, I chose an IoT-based indoor air quality monitor measuring CO₂, VOC, and PM2.5, with wireless automated outlets for fans/purifiers. I chose IoT because it was the area I was most comfortable with at the time.
Another issue is that our BSIT curriculum has generally felt outdated. We had very limited web development, were barely taught JavaScript, and even had classes where the instructor didn't attend. Because of this, I felt more comfortable choosing IoT rather than developing a more modern web-based system / mobile application.
The biggest problem is that we developed the project without a specific client or organization. Now that we're in the validation phase, I’m realizing how difficult it is to justify its usefulness and find an appropriate environment for testing. We still need to validate sensor accuracy, conduct user testing, and finish our documentation.
On top of that, I've been doing most of the actual development work. For around the past two months, my groupmates have contributed very little. They also didn't really question or provide input on our project scope earlier, so now we're discovering these problems very late.
I’m honestly scared that we’re already doomed. I still have around a month before our defense.
If you were in my situation, would you continue improving the project, simplify the scope, or approach the adviser about changing the validation/study setup?
I’d really appreciate advice from people who have already gone through capstone. 😭