Week 2: Module 1

On the second week, students are given a video of short briefing. Firstly is about the PSM 1 rubrics explanation by Sir Inam Abbasi. The explanation on the rubrics are as follow:

• Logbook and week progress (submitted to supervisor on week 6 and week 12). The logbook must consists some aspects such as responsive, initiatives, efforts, and organization.
• Supervisor evaluation form for PSM 1.
  - General conduct; Identifying problem, Application, Decision making, Attitude, Commitment and Displine.
  - Report evaluation; Abstract, Introduction, Problem Statement, Objectives, Project Scope, Literature Review, Methodology, Preliminary Results, Citation and References, Language and Formatting & Conclusion.
• Panel report evaluation form. (submitted together with the final report until preliminary results.)
• Presentation panel evaluation form. 
  - Aspects taken from the evaluation during the presentation are from speech delivery, confidence, understand and able to answer any panel's question regarding the project, organize and presentation skills.
  - Panels would like to know the project readiness & preliminary results.

Next session is about writing an abstract and introduction in the report. "Thesis" is a long piece of writing by a student based on their own research. It would be a statement or opinions discussed in logical way and represented with evidence for proves.

The ABSTRACT are generally between 100 to 300 words in a single paragraph. There are three type of abstract;

• Descriptive - used in social science and humanities. It doesn't give specific information about the methods and results.
• Informative - used in science and present information on the background, aim, methods, results and conclusion.
• Structured - typically found in medical literature and clinical trial and report.

The importance of writing an abstract is that it works as a marketing tool. It helps the reader to decide if the thesis is worth reading. It also provide a quick and accurate summary of the entire work. 

So, how to write an abstract? In order to write them, we need to ask ourself these:

1. Why the research is conducted? (background)
2. What are the aim of this project? (objectives)
3. How the method and issue were met? (research methodology)
4. The main findings of the study are? (results and conclusion)

Secondly, for INTRODUCTION, it is what we call as "Research Background". It describes the background of the problem that is being investigated, explain the problems and the limitation of the existing methods (must be supported with authentic references) and the method that will be used for the project.

Overall from the second week, I had a discussion on the project with my Supervisor to identify the true problem or issues in reading the concentration of sodium chloride in human body using current medical equipment. The cause of this study is that current equipment are electric appliances that could leads to uncertain reading. We are proposing using optical loop fiber as a liquid concentration sensor.